


The Briinah's Story

by Alice_in_Black



Series: Briinah [1]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Alchemy, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canon Divergence, Dark Brotherhood - Freeform, Drama, F/M, Gen, Magic, Minor Character Death, POV First Person, Relapsing, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, actually platonic bed sharing, obviously, uncomfortably close families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-01-14 09:38:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 50
Words: 275,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1261603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alice_in_Black/pseuds/Alice_in_Black
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her whole life, Brina has looked up to her older brother. Strong, smart, talented and undoubtedly blessed by the gods, she's always known he was destined for greatness. When he left home to be an adventurer, she knew he would accomplish something grand. But after losing the family farm, Brina has no choice but to track her brother down and bring him home, both to keep what little remains of her family intact and to keep possession of their little plot of dirt outside of Kvatch. She follows him all across Cyrodiil, and finally up to Skyrim where she learns that he has escaped a dragon attack in Helgen, and been dubbed the Dragonborn.</p><p>"Big Brother" may be the legendary Dovahkiin of Elder Scroll prophecy, but Brina has her own adventure waiting for her. And you don't need a legend to be a hero.</p><p>**Warning, first person POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Remember your first play through after your "main" game? You've mastered all the guilds, cleared all the dungeons, and then you go back to level one. The modest beginning, weak and terrified of skeevers, helpless and without any of the fame and glory. From that humbling experience came an itch to write the story about a poor little wretch, just scrambling to catch up to the glorious Dragonborn.

### Chapter One

From under the jagged outcropping of rock, I looked out into the swirling maelstrom of snow and thunder and certain hypothermia. As it was, bundled up close to the campfire, I was certain that I would either suffocate or be caught aflame before the night was through, and I wondered if a quiet, peaceful death of freezing in my sleep might be preferable. But no, I refused to be another body to be found beside the road. To have my bones stepped on by the uncaring feet of Thalmor patrols, to be forgotten and unburied so far from home… that could not be how I end, after all this time. I have slept in haunted bogs and beast-filled woods, in abandoned bandit dens and hollowed trees. A little storm couldn’t kill me. Not because I was tough or strong, but because I was generally clever enough to find a way to survive. I’d learned a lot just traveling about the countryside of Cyrodiil. If Brother could have seen me then, I like to think he would have been proud. I’ve come this far for him.

  
_24th of Last Seed, 201_  
_Brother,_  
_If you found the last journal I left for you, then you know that I have decided to leave Cyrodiil. Not that I think you’ll find it. But it only seems right to begin this journal where I left off before. I have scoured our homeland, every town, every settlement, every nook and cranny, and spent every last Septim I had trying to track you down, all to no avail. But I have at last discovered that you were seen going north from Bruma, against the warnings of everyone that the passes through the Jerall Mountains were being carefully patrolled. And foolish as I am, I have followed without a second thought. Thus begins the second, and hopefully final leg of my journey. I will find you, Brother. I swear it._  
  
_1st of Heartfire_  
_The roads were scarcely being guarded at all, much to my surprise, but I realized very soon why no one questioned my coming into the province: a dragon attack! Big Brother, can you believe it?! A dragon! It destroyed the city nearest to where I first came out through the Jerall Mountains. If I weren’t so horrified that such a thing could happen, I would be livid that the first place I could stop for rest and supplies has been burnt to the ground and then immediately occupied by bandits. I had to sell all of my alchemical instruments to pay for my travel while still back in Cyrodiil. I would have at least liked to have found some means to make potions so I can start making some money again. But I’m safe and alive. And for that much, I am thankful.  
_ _For now, I’m walking north. I’ll ask everyone I meet if they’ve seen you. I love you, Brother, I promise I will find you._

  
I’m sure I looked like a damn mess when I first walked up to the crumbling wall of the city, calling out for the guards to open the doors for me. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal in days, and positively ached to sleep in an actual bed again. All the weight I could afford to sell had been hawked to finance a new cloak and supplies, but it left me poor and desperate. That, and the state of the city told me something wasn’t right, but I was too worn from the road that I couldn’t begin to fathom just what had gone on. Parapets appeared disassembled, as though a child had begun tearing down his blocks to begin a new project.  No one at all could be seen from the outside, making me feel just as lonely as I’d been in the middle of the snowy pass. And there I was, begging the guards to let me in, pockets full of flowers and roots I had dug up from the frozen ground, only to have a bandit look down at me with pity.  
  
Bundled up with a thick cape over his battered leather armor (no doubt commandeered from the body of the original owner), his hardened eyes actually softened to see me shivering and shaking and almost crying. He was up on the wall, where a town guard would have been posted. In one hand was a bottle; he’d been settling in for a long shift. His other hand slipped behind his back to fondle his bow a bit, but no motions were made to pull it forward. I noticed notches carved into the wooden railings just in front of him, like a scoreboard, and I think that was when I felt myself shiver from more than just the cold. Finally things started to click. Not that I’m not perfectly clever, but I was exhausted.  
  
Yet, seeing the notches, I realized that he had no qualms about shooting me. And what could I do if he did? The weight of my cloak was very little comfort when I considered the plain clothes beneath it, and try as I might my mind just couldn’t formulate any of the spells I knew. I was a sitting duck, looking up at a bandit and wondering, Do the guards know he’s up there?, like I still hadn’t realized that the city was no more.  
  
“What are you doing there?” he called down. It was soft, like a yell with the intention of a whisper. As soon as the question left his mouth, he glanced back over his shoulder, then to me, then back again.  
  
This man was a killer. He made his money by picking it off corpses. The thought of why he might keep me alive had me shrinking in my furs. Stupidly, I answered him anyways. “I just came over the pass. From Cyrodiil. When I wasn’t stopped near the border, I thought it meant that all was at peace in Skyrim.” The stupidest sentence ever spoken, spoken in one of my stupidest moments. “And I thought the first city I found, I could get food and rest. I’m so hungry, and so cold…!”  
  
“Hush!” he scolded. Another glance over his shoulder, and nervous lick of his lips. He was sizing me up now, and I could tell that he didn’t know what to do with me. The answer should have been obvious for a bandit, of course, and the notches indicated that this bandit was very good at being one. The cold, tired, hungry part of me (currently a very large part), made me naïve enough to think he must have been a good person deep down, and that was why I didn’t have an arrow in my eye yet.  
  
When he spoke again, his voice was even lower, but clearer. He was enunciating as carefully as his gravely voice permit. “What are you doing in Skyrim? Just look here! Helgen herself has been leveled by a dragon!”  
  
I looked around the shambling skeleton of a city that I could see from this side of the dilapidated wall. The inky black sky and swirling auroras had entirely distracted me from the streaks of soot that clung to what stones remained in place.  
  
“Dragons don’t exist. Not anymore.” The first thought that came into my head. Wizards could have done all that. Maybe daedra, if things were really bad. I would know, since our family farm was just outside of Kvatch. I grew up hearing all the wild stories about what had happened years and years ago. I had rolled my eyes back then, ashamed at the foolishness of people misled by daedra. Big Brother had gotten all excited, eating up the crazy tales and begging for more. Since he loved adventurous stories, I pretended to also. So I knew the stories very well. The sudden tangent of my thoughts reminded me of the bandit’s question. “I’m looking for my brother. I last heard he was coming into Skyrim. He would have passed through here.”  
  
Now the bandit really looked like he was pitying me. I can’t say why. The expression seemed to be folding new creases into his face, and I swear I saw his eye twitch from the foreign emotion. Hardened bandits don’t usually get all soft and sentimental for anyone, let alone defenseless little lambs who go walking into the range of their bows. I must have really looked pathetic.  
  
“He would have been here… probably two weeks ago. He would have made better time out of the mountains than I did.”  
  
“I hope you’re wrong,” he said at first. The bandit moved away from the railing, walked around a bit, and seemed to pretend to be bored as he sat down on the chair up at his post. Again, his voice got quieter. I had to hold my breath to hear him, and the more I focused, the more I could hear other voices chattering on the other side of the wall. “You need to go north. Just keep going. The road will get easier and the snow will let up. There’s a town called Riverwood. I have an old friend, haven’t seen him in years and he has no clue whatever became of me, but he should still be living there. Alvor. Tell him... Just tell him Thrynn said to let you in and to feed you. And if he asks, my sword hasn’t lost its edge and my bow hasn’t aged a day.”  
  
“You can’t let me in?” I glanced overhead, just then realizing that any moment a dragon could swoop down. A dragon! And Big Brother would be so excited to hear of it, too.  
  
“You wouldn’t want to come in even if I could,” he answered with a grim smirk. “This lot is softer than what I used to run with. But they wouldn’t just leave a pretty thing walking right into their domain untouched.”  
  
The idea seemed to bother him more than I would expect from a bandit. And the very last thing I felt was pretty. “I don’t really have much they could rob me of.”  
  
“You’d be surprised.” The bandit stood again, this time with some bread in hand, and he made a show of casually leaning against the wooden railing while he dropped the treasure. “You should hurry. Get away from here and keep moving and you should be able to reach Riverwood tomorrow night at the latest.”  
  
I caught the bread with a swifter hand than I knew I had. I didn’t wait a moment to start stuffing it into my mouth.  
  
“Good luck finding your brother,” the bandit said while he turned and sat back down. And with a nod, I knew I was being dismissed.  
  
I wouldn’t get a bed tonight, but as I started running around the side of the city wall, I realized how lucky I was none the less. I had missed a dragon attack on the ground which I now stood, and I had stood face-to-face with a bandit who fed me instead of shooting me down. The start of my stay in Skyrim was both unfortunate and fortunate, and I couldn’t yet tell which would stick.

  
_26th of Heartfire  
My heart aches that I have no idea where you are even still. I stayed in Riverwood for a few weeks, making and selling potions at the inn and helping out the local smith to earn money and a place to stay. As promised, I asked everyone if they had seen you. At first I was horrified to learn that you had been in Helgen during the attack, but I was later told that you had gotten out alive. You didn’t tell anyone where you were going, but a few people suspected you were headed to Whiterun. Others thought Solitude to join the Imperial Legion – as if you’d make that mistake again! And then there were some who swore up and down you were on your way to Windhelm to join the Stormcloaks, to which I say over my dead Imperial body! Wherever you are, brother, you need your ears boxed or to be put in a stern time out. I hope for your sake that you were sensible and went to Whiterun where you won’t be getting into trouble._

  
Avlor didn’t question me when I turned up at his door. My cloak was soaked through, and I was out of food again, and I hadn’t had a proper bath in weeks by now. He may as well have seen a skeever at his feet. All I had to say was that I had come up from Helgen and Thrynn said he would feed me. Terrified that Alvor would make me prove myself to be better acquainted with the bandit than I actually was, I was prepared to make up all sorts of lies, but the smith had only asked about his sword and his bow, and proceeded to open his pantry to me. His wife was just as hospitable, and gave me clean a dress to wear, thank the Eight.  
  
When I sat by their fire the first night, looking down at the journal I wrote to Brother, the taste of bile filled my mouth. As I thought over the first few days spent in Skyrim, following the week I had tromped through the Jeralls, I was disgusted in myself. I sold all my alchemical supplies, all mother’s jewelry, everything not absolutely necessary, and still been completely unprepared. I had gone from every corner of Cyrodiil and back without nearly so much trouble! This land was out to kill me, I was sure, and I couldn’t bear to put it to paper.  
  
Brother would be so ashamed. Adventurous Brother, strong Brother, capable Brother. He would never have been so vulnerable.  
  
So I didn’t write. For weeks, I just tried to get my bearings, to recover my strength and make money. Avlor and his family were nothing but welcoming, especially since I repaid them for their generousness by helping Alvor out at his forge every day. I’ve always been useless with a hammer, but my skill with magic made me helpful in controlling the heat of the forge. I could also do simple tasks, like the ones he assigned his daughter. And I finally started to earn Septims by turning my collection of herbs and the things I found near Riverwood into potions.  
  
And all the while, I asked questions. I described Brother’s face and I said his name to every soul I met. And everyone seemed to know something. Not much, but something.  
  
“Of course! He returned this for me!” Lucan Valerius crowed, snatching a peculiar golden figure from the counter to wave it in front of me proudly. It was very much like how a child would flaunt his favorite toy, while insisting no one else touch or so much as get a good look at it. “He went up to the barrow like it was no trouble at all, and came back with this and a ton of gold to spend. Best damn customer I’ve had in ages!” He laughed, and the sound made me queasy.  
  
“Do you know where he is now?” I asked, the vital question that I had learned to dread. Everyone had a different answer, and none gave me any stronger lead than what the others gave me.  
  
“Whiterun,” the shopkeeper said without a moment of hesitation. The little shop was nothing impressive, but his sister did a good job keeping it clean and tidy. I busied myself with half-heartedly perusing his wares while he rambled on, saying, “Carmilla was pining and whining over it for days after he left. After all, she was swooning over the man, and he took Faendal with him! With two of her three prospects up and leaving her in their dust, she was sore and wouldn’t let me hear the end of it.” Lucan went into a shrill falsetto and crooned in what I assume was an imitation of his sister, “Why go to Whiterun when I’m here? I can’t believe they led me on like that! I thought we had something special!” It took a clear of his throat to return it to its normal pitch. “Well, not very special if it’s something she carries on with half the men who step into the village, that’s for sure!”  
  
And then he laughed again, and I had to excuse myself. I got what I really needed, which was a purse full of clinking gold and more answers about Brother.  
  
Everyone seemed fairly divided on where he had gone, but Whiterun was closest and made the most sense. And since I had spent so long getting myself back in order, I knew I couldn’t stall any longer. Hopefully Brother would still be in the city when I arrived.  
  
The next morning, I wrote in my journal to Brother, and stopped by Lucan’s store one last time to get another set of clean clothes and rations for my next journey. I bid farewell to Alvor, hugged Dorthe and Sigrid with tear-filled eyes, and set off again.  
  
“Promise to come back!” Dorthe cried.  
  
I ran my fingertips through her hair and kissed her crown, smiling wide through my tears. This wasn’t a sad goodbye, and I refused to let it be our last. Unlike Brother, I would return. I would make good on my promises. “Of course I’ll come back!” I swore, saying the words that my hero would never have said on his life. “I wouldn’t ever forget about you, my dear!”  
  
For a moment, I wished Brother could have been more like me. Then it occurred to me how sacrilegious the desire sounded within my own mind. He was indeed my hero, the standard of perfection and virtue I had held myself to all my life. And for all the faults I could see in him as a rational adult, I knew I would never change him even if I could.  
  
I kissed Dorthe again. Then I left. And I wondered if Brother ever missed anyone of the many, many people that he left behind.

  
_28th of Heartfire_  
_Another dragon! And a dragon-born, whatever that means! Everyone has such wild stories, and they don’t all match up. It’s getting confusing and scary, and Big Brother, this was supposed to be your job! You were supposed to be the strong one who would keep our family together! But I buried mother and father all by myself, and I have looked for you ever since, and I just feel like a stupid little child again. The alchemist lets me sit in her shop and mix silly little elixirs like mother used to, but I haven’t done anything good in the weeks I’ve been here yet. I mostly just mope and feel scared and alone. One thing everyone seemed sure about was that you would return. But you haven’t.  
Ysolda wants her ring back. I guess she’s just going to have to go out looking for you, too._

  
Word about another dragon was too much to handle, and naturally it was the first thing I heard when I walked into Whiterun. The guards were abuzz, some showing of mars in their shields and notches in their blades with glowing pride. “This is where I hit scale, with all my might, and cracked through to flesh!” and “This is where its tooth came down! Had I not thrown my shield up right when I did, it would have been my head!” and other stories, all told with equal parts amazement and satisfaction.  
  
Brother would have been thrilled. He would have ooed and awed over their stories and scars. But not me. I carried a dagger, and half the time I cut myself when I so much as drew it. I never wore armor, and could cast just enough magic to not get laughed out of a magic shop. Dangerous things in dangerous places only frightened me, and all he ever seemed to do was lead me right into them.  
  
So now, with my eyes constantly glancing up to the clear and frigid skies, I set out to track Brother down. Townsfolk recognized the name instantly, and went into tirades that I could barely follow. Dragon-born? Greybeards? Devouring souls? Within two hours of being in Whiterun my head was spinning with information that was all completely foreign to me. And there was no sign of you at all.  
  
“He’ll be back soon,” too many people said. The Bannered Mare gathered just about everyone for me to speak to, and they all had come to the same conclusions. “He’s thane here, so as soon as he’s done with the greybeards he’ll come right back.”  
  
While the town was friendly enough, I never got the same hospitable treatment I got from Alvor. I paid to rent a room on a nightly basis while I waited for Brother to return, and my money was fast depleting. Brother would know nothing about these troubles, since Septims seemed to jut fall from the sky for him. But my potions were only getting me so far.  
  
And, before long, I realized I couldn’t keep renting a room at the rate I was going. Luckily, while traipsing around outside the city for things to brew, I found the answer. A little abandoned shack, just ruins on the side of the road, with a bed free of most the crawling things I had expected. It was awful, really, but so much better than what I had suffered in the Jerall Mountains and other places along the road in Cyrodiil. I could easily accept this. So for a few days I gathered components and other bits for my potions, slept in the gutted house, and returned to Whiterun to restock on food, brew and sell my potions, and get a real bath and real bed at the Bannered Mare while I made my rounds asking all the patrons if Brother had returned.  
  
Two whole months had passed like this. Days in the wilderness, one day in the city, back and forth for weeks and weeks. I was miserable and losing hope fast, and my brand new dresses from the Riverwood Trader were worn and needing replacement. But whenever I got back to the city, made my potions, and sold them for the Septims to get a good meal and a bed, I was elated. Clean bedding, supper, a bath! Oh, how I adored the baths!  
  
I was back in the city, about eight weeks after I’d started living in the ruined farmhouse, soaking in the warmth of the fire in the Bannered Mare. I cleaned my bowl of stew, and was counting the few Septims I had left to decide if I should get another.  
  
“I don’t see you nearly often enough these days,” lamented a voice from behind me. People love to sneak up from behind me. The golden-haired Nord was looming above where I sat, lute in hand as though ready to serenade me on the spot. Ever since Carlotta snuffed out the flame he had for her, purportedly by the persuasion of Brother, he was getting ever bolder with the other ladies of the city. And tonight, that seemed to include me.  
  
“I’m busy. We can’t all sing the days away and count out gold all night,” I teased back. Oh, the idyllic life of a bard! Paid to play around in a warm and comfortable tavern all day was hardly a job!  
  
“Oh, but you could!” Mikael took this chance to sit down on the bench beside me. I was treating myself to a pint of mead tonight by the fire, and when the bard got a look inside my tankard and saw it was low, he waved at Saadia to refill it.  
  
It had better be on his tab, was all I could think. Being poor changes the way you look at gestures of kindness, I suppose.  
  
He shot Saadia a dashing smile when she returned with fresh drinks for the both of us, but started into his raving before he’d even taken a sip. “You have so much fire and passion in you! Go to the college, and they’ll teach you how to turn that passion into song!” Blue eyes sparkled with mischief as he studied me over the rim of his tankard. “Or I can teach you…!”  
  
“Of course!” It sounded as sarcastic as I’d hoped. Good. I smirked when I saw Hulda roll her eyes the instant she recognized Mikael’s antics.  
  
“I can!” the bard insisted, completely undeterred. “Name any instrument, and I will teach you to play it! Any song and you shall master it!”  
  
At this point I had to bite my tongue. Mikael had never been anything but kind and attentive to me, but his intentions were clear enough for even me to see through. My course was set on my brother’s trail, and so I wouldn’t have been any more interested if it was settling down that he had in mind. But if he thought he had me fooled, he was mistaken. “I appreciate the offer, Mikael, but I’ll have to refuse. I heard all about how my brother gave you a black eye for Carlotta, and I would hate to see what he’d do when he gets back to see your… lute in the lap of his little sister.”  
  
He at least had the sense to pretend to be shocked at the implications. With one hand going to his chest, like I had wounded him with my words, he protested, “It’s nothing so sordid! So what if I find you enchanting, could he not be happy for us?”  
  
“You should step away from the lady,” declared a voice behind us both. People love to join a conversation from behind. I thought I’d been handling myself just fine, but clearly there was someone under the impression that I needed help. And who should I turn to see but another woman, heavily armored and scowling. Uthgerd. I’d seen her in here before, and she often carried on conversations with Mikael. Strangely enough, he barely seemed interested in her as he was in the company of other women, probably because she would snap his arms like twigs if he so much as looked at her wrong. To my eternal gratitude, she seemed to have quite a bit of power over him. The moment she made her demand, Mikael was off the bench and at the other side of the Mare, strumming his lute at Ysolda.  
  
I took great pains not to meet Ysolda’s eyes. On more than one occasion she’d come to me regarding a debt my brother owed her. Instead I focused solely on Uthgerd, my face set in a wide and appreciative smile. “I try to steer him away without hurting his feelings.”  
  
“That sort of kindness doesn’t often get rewarded,” the warrior woman said. Mikael’s tankard was practically untouched, and she had no qualms about picking up where he left off. The light dancing from the large fire at the center of the hall caught the wrinkles around her eyes, making her look older than she was. Unbroken, they called her, and that may have been true. But she wasn’t without her trials and scars. Not that they were my business… I looked away from her and into the inferno. “When you first came into town, you made it sound like you wouldn’t be staying.”  
  
“I wasn’t planning on staying, no. But that did change…” I decided that she was just trying to make conversation. With nothing to get suspicious about, I felt comfortable enough to answer. “I got the impression that staying put would be best for now. My brother was supposed to be coming back here, after all.”  
“He is Dragonborn,” she said with such a mystified expression that I wanted to punch her in the mouth. Of course, I didn’t want my knuckles to get cracked or my nose broken, so I kept my reaction to myself, but really, she could have tried looking less adoring. Who was she? Why should she look so impressed by Brother? “His fate will lead him far and wide, on the most glorious quest…”  
  
I sniffed to keep anything acidic from coming out my mouth. “Then let’s hope he does come back here first, so I don’t have to follow him on that glorious quest...”


	2. In Which She Falls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Dragonborn's little sister has been following him all across Cyrodiil, and now into Skyrim, just to get him to come home. But she's caught some snags in Whiterun, and it's looking like she won't be following his trail any time soon. Instead, she's getting more and more attached to the community, despite her self-appointed mission to drag the Dovahkiin back to the family farm.

### Chapter Two

_3rd of Evening Star_  
 _Dear Big Brother,  
The day we got word from the legion that you had defected, Mother was in tears and Father was hollering up and down the house. You’d been in the legion a whole eight months before disappearing in the middle of training one day. Broad daylight, and the all of your commanding officers swear that no one even saw you leave. For almost four months we didn’t see you but we got letters regularly, never with any clue where they were sent from. Finally, after you came back, you were dirty and covered in scabs, holding an enchanted sword that you’d found somewhere and wearing the biggest smile I’d ever seen on you. We never knew how, but you’d cleared your name with the legion regarding your defection. And you had gold, pounds and pounds of gold stuffed into every pocket and filling more space in your pack than food or supplies! As though in the time you were gone, it had just been raining coins on you! I never understood your luck, or how easily you got out of every mess you ended up in, or how you could walk into danger with a grin and leave alive and well every time. You were blessed from the very beginning, and now that all seems even more sure. You’re the dragonborn now, but to me, it’s just a name for what I already knew about you since we were little kids together._

_But what am I? What have I ever been? Never lucky, definitely not that! Not strong with a blade, not as quick of wit, not as light on my feet. I was always just your sister, sitting in your shadow, and I adored you so much that I never minded one bit. But without you now, I’m realizing that there’s very little to me. Who am I, if not just your sister? Sometimes I felt Mother and Father didn’t even have a name for me; I grew up being “sister.” I must be more than that, right? If I had it my way, would I be more, or would I just be your sister forever?_

_It doesn’t matter. I can wonder and debate my whole life, but right now my mission is clear. I need to find you and bring you home. Like always, my existence is defined by you, Brother. My fate, as it always has been, is to follow you. Maybe one day I will be something other than your sister, your shadow, but that time is not in the foreseeable future. Perhaps it’s not in my future at all._

_All I know now is that you’re not coming back and it is my job to find you. So it’s time for me to leave Whiterun. It’s time for me to find you._

I rolled through the rocks and brambles, tumbling across the rocky ground helplessly. My hands flew out, releasing my hold on the magical energy I had been trying to focus into a proper attack to instead try and grasp some roots or rocks to slow my fall. The drop was slowed by my flailing just enough to make my eventual plop into the river below considerably less painful than it otherwise would have been. Above me, still at the top of the hill, I heard the wolves growl and bark hungrily.

It was just my luck that only a few hours away from Whiterun I should be attacked by wolves. I would have paid for a carriage ride, but I simply didn’t have the money to, and since I often walked as much as a league a day since my search for Brother had begun in Cyrodiil, I didn’t think anything of it. But the roads are so dangerous in Skyrim, especially the further one gets from a city.

I scrambled in the shallow water, reigniting the flames in my hands with a thought as soon as I could get myself up off of my hands and knees. The wolves were giving me no time to recover, and I had to spin in the current to face a wolf that had boldly jumped right down after me.

A deliberate pull from the pools of magicka in my mind sent the flames in my hands swirling outward like a graceful hand reaching through the air to stroke the wolf’s fur. The resulting effect was not nearly as lovely. Being in the water didn’t do much to save it, and while it slowed the process, I knew better than to switch to a lightning spell. Two other wolves looked down over the steep hillside at me and their fallen comrade, seeming to weigh their options. One had already taken a bite out of me, and seeing its red jaws sporting a string of my leg sent me reeling. If I wasn’t busy trying to defend myself, I would have lost my breakfast.

The wolf who had my blood in its mouth wanted more, and it wasn’t deterred by the charred dog I was standing over in the water. It came down the hill, claws tearing up the thistles and thicket I had rolled over, jaws wide for another hunk of me before it even made it halfway down. Its descent gave me the opportunity to point with my left hand at it, a needle of ice forming along the shape of my outstretched finger. It took just an instant for the needle to expand to the size of my arm and shoot forward. With better aim than I could ever have managed with an arrow, the bolt of ice hit the wolf square in the face. It splintered, making a shattering sound, and the shards of ice dug themselves deep into the wolf’s eyes and brain.

I always hated using magic that way. There would be nightmares tonight.

No time to shudder or get sick, though; there was still one more wolf wanting my face for lunch. My hands flexed, as if I could pull more magicka forward so simply, but the truth was that I had exhausted my stores of magic for now. Buying time was my only option, so I turned and splashed through the water, away from my hunter. I could hear it barreling down the slope, then tearing through the shallow waters, hot on my heels. I just wasn’t ready yet—I pulled my dagger, used more for cutting up alchemical ingredients than fighting for my life, and swung wildly.

Amazingly, I hit the brute. And even more amazingly, I’d done so poorly at cleaning my tools that there must have been some imp stool left on the blade. The wolf faltered in its pursuit, muscles and joints locking as paralysis took hold of it.

Well, I may be shit with a blade, but I know  which side of a knife is the business end and the wolf wasn’t putting up any fight for the moment. Knowing that the effects could be gone in just a second, I splashed forward and drove the dagger downward. Once, twice, three times—I didn’t know how much it would take to kill it, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

Even splattered with blood, standing in the river at least made me feel clean. I remember when I used to bathe daily. I used to take it so much for granted… The wolves around me wouldn’t be of any use. I wasn’t about to eat them and get rockjoint. I wondered about taking them apart and maybe holding onto the pelts to sell, but the weight just couldn’t be justified. I had a long way to walk still.

So I loitered in the river, trudging through the current away from the wolves and where they dirtied the water to splash my face and neck. I would regret letting my clothes get soaked, but for now I would relish the feeling of dirt and grime and blood getting washed from me.

I was right about to get out of the water when I saw it. Glowing, gleaming, singing to me. Oh, such a treasure couldn’t be passed up! I wondered briefly if Brother knew this feeling. Had he ever felt giddy at the sight of a plant peeking through the mud? Did he know the joy of tasting something new for the first time and knowing just what it would mix perfectly with? Could Brother spend hours chasing after butterflies, only to let half of them go because they were just too pretty to destroy?

Suddenly, in the light of the nirnroot, I saw who I was. I saw the embodiment of my passion, my aspirations, and I heard them whispered to me in the nirnroot’s chime.

The realization was like the river had turned to ice. I saw myself as an independent entity, separate from my brother, separate from the family that had defined all of my memories and identity. It was liberating, and terrifying. Mother and Father had been long since dead by now, and Brother was nowhere to be found, but in this moment I felt so alone. If I was indeed my own person, then all this time I have been alone. I could die right now, and no one would know. Brother would never wonder, Mother and Father wouldn’t be waiting for me, I would just be gone.

I am my own person. I am unique and I can be more than just Brother’s sister. I have joy in my life, I have desires, I have hopes, all that I have choked and ignored for my family, especially Brother. If I pursued that side of me instead, what would become of this person I am now? If I let go of the only person I had left, could I really survive being so utterly alone?

Maybe I just hadn’t eaten in almost three days and had just finished fighting for my life, and just happened to be a bit emotional. Maybe I was just getting too philosophical. But before I knew it, I had become so wrapped up in my thoughts and left reeling by my internal dialogue that I wasn’t focusing on the river. The closer I got to the nirnroot, the deeper the water got, and before I knew it I was stepping into an undercurrent that swept me right off of me feet, and out into the rapids.

And, though I should have been looking for a way out, or focusing on keeping my head up, all I could think was the word, “Shit!” over and over.

The water came to a ledge, about twenty feet down. Not much considering some of the incredible waterfalls I’d heard about being all over the province, but enough of a fall and with enough rocks at the bottom to make me scream at the top of my lungs. What was gurgled out through the water rang through the trees and echoed up the jagged cliffs, and the sound of my own death-scream made me even more frightened. Then I was over the ledge, tumbling helplessly for the second time in ten minutes.

I had to stop with this before I made a habit of it, really. That was the last thing I thought of before a rock hit my head and my vision went dark.

_3rd of Evening Star  
One step forward and two steps back. I haven’t given up, Brother, I promise you. But for now, it seems my only option is to hope that you come to me._

“You are remarkably lucky,” Danica said for the eighth time as she inspected the place where my leg had snapped. “You won’t be able to walk or run as much as you have been; your feet have thick enough callouses that I might have mistaken them for hooves. So you’ll have to get used to staying in one place for a time.”

Kynareth had a nice temple, though I had no intention of staying in it. The high ceilings let the evening sun pour in in streams of gold and orange, painting the flagstone floors in fiery splotches. Strands of ivy and moss flowed from around the windows, but I was too busy wondering how they managed to water them without making a mess to appreciate their beauty. All in all, the temple was one of the most welcoming places I’d been in since coming to Skyrim, yet for all the gentle smiles of the priests and priestesses, I couldn’t help but feel like they were smiling at my brother, of whom I was just an aspect.

The hunters who followed my screams and found me had brought me back to Whiterun, which was frustrating, but not surprising. However, I was surprised that my head getting cracked open wasn’t the worst of my injuries. My leg would always have an ugly red scar across it, from my knee to my ankle where the bones had splintered and come through the skin. My hair would cover the small smooth spot at my crown that had been lacking skull just a few hours ago.

I ran my hand over my hair, smiling. They had given me a bath. A really nice bath, with soap, and had covered my body in lavender oil. Then they gave me fresh new clothes to wear. And then they fed me. Getting injured had led to the most pampered I’d been in my life, and it had turned out to make coming all the way back to Whiterun feel very worth it. And right then, I wasn’t upset about not being able to continue my journey. I still had every intention of finding Brother, but I was tired in so many ways, and my moment with the nirnroot had me curious: could I really be my own person, without Brother? Could I survive being alone, without my brother being intrinsically a part of my personhood? Maybe, just for a little while… could I just try it?

“Thank you,” I said quietly, observing the healer’s handiwork.

Danica gave me a smile and nodded toward the door. “Your brother has done some incredible things in the short time since he came to us. The Gildergreen is already beginning to bloom again, thanks to him. Doing this for you is the very least I could do.”

Well, so much for being something other than Brother’s sister. Who was I kidding, anyway? My brother was all I had left. And as far as anyone I had ever known was concerned, he was the most important, defining thing about me. “I should get going. He’s not coming back here, so I need to go find him.”

“I’m sorry,” Danica said, resting a comforting hand on my shoulder. “You’ll just have to wait for him here for a while longer. Your leg may be healed for the most part, but it’s weak. When I said you’ll have to get used to staying in one place, I meant you won’t be traveling for a while.”

“I can buy a horse.” With all the gold I didn’t have. “Or hire a carriage.” Same problem. But Danica didn’t need to know how poor I was.

“I don’t think that’s wise. You’ll be in a delicate state for a while. I want you to stay where I can fix any damage that may come back.” The priestess of Kynareth stood from me and paced to a nearby shelf plucking a couple narrow bottles to present to me. “Topical treatments for your leg and head, and one to drink for any pain. Jenssen is out arranging a place for you to stay for the night.”

As if waiting for his cue, the young acolyte entered through the main doors, which hovered open behind him as the wind rushed in and out again with a great breath of the building. A chill ran down my spine—it made me uncomfortable how alive the temple felt sometimes, regardless of how beautiful it was.

“I’m sorry, but Hulda doesn’t have any more beds tonight. I tried asking Lydia, but she said the Dragonborn told her not to let anyone in while he was away. Luckily, Anoriath overheard me talking with Lydia in front of Breezehome. He offered a bed at the Drunken Huntsman, and let me know to tell you that you may stay as long as you like.”

The weight that was lifted from my chest and the memories of living in a roofless, half-destroyed shack miles from town had tears welling in my eyes. Was that all I had to do this whole time? Just ask Anoriath? Or was it out of pity that the most destitute person in town, poorer even than Brenuin, had become even worse off and gotten herself injured? I knew that my pride should have felt wounded, but then I thought of how nice it would feel to sleep in a bed more than a couple of times a week, or how safe I would be not needing to fear being woken by wolves or bandits or worse.

Then, it hit me. The words in Jenssen’s speech that had rung just a little wrong in my ears. “What was that about Lydia and my brother?” I’d seen Lydia a couple of times, but never actually met the woman. She lived in Breezehome, alone, and rarely left it.

“Lydia is the Dragonborn’s housecarl. Breezhome belongs to him,” Danica explained simply, blinking at me in a way that made me feel like an idiot child.

All those nights curled up alone in the wilderness, thinking it was all I could do and thinking that as long as I was dedicated to my alchemy, that I could earn the means to find Brother again… and all this time he had a house. In the city. That I just wasn’t allowed in. My blood was boiling, and Anoriath and his immense generosity were the furthest things from my mind, pushed back behind images of setting my beloved brother’s house on fire. Oh, I was so sick of being good and meek and dutifully searching for him. I could go to prison, because even then I would be living in better conditions than I had been since living in Whiterun. I imagined a dozen ways to destroy the house, to kick the door in and eat his food and tear his roof off and see how he liked living in a ruin! I knew I never would, and I never could act out against Brother. But it was so satisfying to imagine that I would.

It felt like that night, almost four years ago. I swore, even in the Temple of Kynareth, I could feel the dirt on my face and hands, under my nails and clinging to every thread I wore. That night, when I buried Mother and Father all alone, and I knew that Brother was far away. He couldn’t be bothered with my troubles. No, Brother was too important to be troubled by the strife of our family; he was too far away to know or care that his little sister was alone and afraid in an empty farmstead.

Abandonment swept over me for the too-many-nth time.

Danica’s hand was on my shoulder suddenly, and when I looked up, I realized that the sun was coming in through the windows in much dimmer streams of red. “You’ve been seething for nearly an hour, girl,” she said. What in Oblivion? Had I really? “Jenssen is ready to help you down to the Drunken Huntsman. 

“I can’t even walk down to the Plains District?”

My less-than-grateful tone made Danica’s nose scrunch up. “I made a million specks of bone one again. Any lesser healer could have done nothing save cut your leg off. As for your head, I’m starting to think it was already broken long before I got hold of it.”

“Sorry… I guess I’m just a little disappointed that he had a house here this whole time and I’ve been…”

“Living in that old abandoned farmhouse?” she finished for me. When my jaw dropped, her annoyance softened into pity. I was getting very good at recognizing that look lately. “Of course everyone knows. You only came into the city a few times a week, and when you came back you were dirty and ravenous. What was amazing was that you never once asked for any kind of help. It’s earned you quite a bit of respect, actually. After all, that kind of stupid independence is very…”

Now it was my turn to interrupt. “Nord-like?”

Danica smiled. She wasn’t offended, at least. “Something like that. But you should know, as much as everyone respects you for your independence, most would be willing to help if they thought you would accept. Anoriath was the first to make the offer, but I’m sure if Jenssen had asked anyone in the market, their home would have been open to you.” Her voice had the warm, lyrical quality that some Nord women had, and it made me believe her words even more.

I licked my lips. My anger was subsiding, the heat of frustration being cooled into the gentle warmth of pride. The people of Whiterun actually liked me? They respected me? My voice croaked as I uttered the question I dreaded: “Is it because I’m the Dragonborn’s sister?”

It was all I could do to just hold my breath as Danica seemed to roll her answer over her tongue many times before answering. “No.” My breath left in a sigh. “At least, not entirely. Of course it helps. But by now, after the months you’ve been living in and near the city, you are known for your own face and your own accomplishments. And living the way you have been, alone and working tirelessly… It’s been noticed. You’re one of us, as far as anyone in Whiterun is concerned. Your brother may be Dragonborn, and a thane, but he will never know us the way you do.”

I needed to get to the Drunken Huntsman. My apparently-Nordic pride wouldn’t let me start crying right here in the temple, but as long as I was hearing all of this I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to help it no matter how hard I tried.

Jenssen, Kyne bless him, swooped in right then to wrap a priest’s cloak over my shoulders and lift me up swiftly. He was young, with dark hair like an Imperial. It reminded me of Father when I was a child and he still had his youth. Not that Father would ever have wanted to be a priest, and certainly wouldn’t have been accepted as one even if he did.

“Thank you, Danica,” I managed to choke even as I was being carried out. Over the broad shoulder of the acolyte, I thought I saw her nod in acknowledgement before turning away from the door as the temple breathed it shut.

~.~.~

Big Brother never cried. Never. But when we were children, I could barely make it an hour without weeping over something. A sudden melancholy thought would leave me in hysterics, or thinking of something beautiful would inspire tears of elation. Mother never knew what to do with me, and often fluttered about worriedly for a while until at last she handed me to Brother. Father couldn’t abide by my constant crying, and often gave me a stern, disapproving look until I at least quieted myself. Brother never cried, but he knew the tricks for controlling tears and stopping them, which always impressed me. How could he know how not to cry if he never did it to begin with?

He told me to hold my breath until my sobs stopped hitching in my chest. Then, to stop the tears, look up at the sky and count the stars—don’t think about how pretty the stars are, you idiot, you’re just going to start all over again! Now that the tears have stopped and you’re breathing normal, dab your face, don’t wipe it. Wiping will make it red, and everyone will know you’ve been crying. Now run around for a little while, or play with Father’s old sword from his years as a Kvatch guard. All the excitement will be drained out of you, and any flush in your skin can be explained by the sweat on your brow and the battered stumps behind the house.

Would Brother be proud if he knew that I didn’t cry when Mother and Father died? I buried them dutifully, stoically. I wasn’t a child anymore, so it wasn’t like I was an orphan or anything. I didn’t cry.

I counted more stars in the sky than I ever knew even existed, and I beat up the useless, waterlogged old logs in front of the house until Father’s sword broke. And I held my breath until my lungs burned. But I didn’t cry.

My options were limited in the Huntsman, so I counted the threads in the linens that I had pulled over my head. 

_16th of Evening Star_  
 _Dear Big Brother,  
I’m still in Whiterun, and I’ll be waiting for you here until my leg is well enough for me to travel. Then I’ll keep on looking. This is the first time in almost four years since I’ve been grounded in one place and not looking for you. I can’t believe it. When I think of it in those terms, I cannot tell if I feel empty, miserable, helpless, or… happy._

Since I could no longer tromp about the countryside to gather flowers for potions, I was preparing myself for even more hardship. Elrindir promised me that I could stay as long as I need or want; the act of charity flustered me and confused me, but in light of what Danica had told me before, brought an embarrassed smile to my face. This charity was a bit out of pity, yes, but it also stemmed from a sense of respect that the people of Whiterun were getting for me. And, as Elrindir put it, “Skyrim has a way of making Nords out of everyone. And everyone has seen the change in you.”

I wondered if Big Brother would be as proud of me. A revered hero, building more and more of a name for himself with each passing day... I heard he had a house in every city, and that his wealth was incredible and ever-growing. He would never know desperation the way I did, and I feared that he would be disgusted with me if he did know.

Elrindir had left me to myself then to settle in the large room upstairs. The bed was enormous and clean, and I didn’t fear sullying it since my body was freshly cleaned from my stay at the temple. Despite all of my torn feelings, about being forced to stay, wanting to leave, resenting Brother and wanting to find him, being ashamed and being proud, I had had to focus on holding back tears all night until sleep took me.

The sound of wind outside woke me up just long enough to realize that I was sleeping safely indoors. At peace, I fell asleep again the moment I shut my eyes.

This went on for a while longer. I would get emotional some nights, but otherwise my life was simple and peaceful. Every morning I would ask around if anyone had seen or heard from Brother, but inevitably they would all say no. I would spend my days with Arcadia, who seemed to be smiling a bit wider at me these days, and often let me use extra ingredients, or pay me to make the recipes that she was planning on making herself that day.

“You’re looking rather pale,” she said after I’d been living in the Huntsman about two weeks. “It must be that you’re no longer in the sun all day for days at a time. But otherwise, you’re healthier than I’ve ever seen you! You must eat very well with those Bosmer!”

“Yes,” I sighed wistfully from the alchemy table. I was stripping the hard outer wood from some canis root for her. She needed just the xylem for a potion, and extracting that from the whole root was a tedious enough task for her to just pay me outright to do it for her. “I definitely have been living comfortably.”

“When the Dragonborn comes back, will you leave with him?” she asked offhandedly.

“Probably. If it’s up to me, he’ll be coming back with me to Cyrodiil. Or, at least he’ll finish up what mess he’s in here, and then he’ll come back with me.” I peeled a strip of green ribbon from the black root and set it aside.

Arcadia set a small dish of eggshells at the edge of the table, which I poured into the mortar with the canis root xylem, and began beating away. “You won’t be sad to go?” she asked. “I spent my youth in Cyrodiil, and I miss it… but I wouldn’t trade Whiterun for the world.”

“Of course I’ll be sad!” I said, startling myself with how quick and emphatic my answer had been. The very idea of leaving had me glancing up at the ceiling to collect myself. “I love everyone here. But my home is in Kvatch.”

“I thought my home was the Imperial City,” Arcadia lamented. “But Cyrodiil isn’t the gleaming gem of the empire like it used to be. Is your home in Kvatch worth leaving this behind?”

“I… don’t know,” I answered honestly. “The farm probably is owned by the count now. I have no idea if he’d be willing to give it back even if I did bring Brother. But without Brother, I wouldn’t have any chance of living there again.”

Arcadia was quiet for a moment, and when I looked up at her face, I saw she was frowning at me. She looked like Mother, actually, when I was doing something stupid, right before she would say, _You know better than that_. Instead, Arcadia said, “You’re making a new life for yourself here. A happy, comfortable life with people who care about you. And you would give it up on the chance of getting back a difficult life in a farm in a war-ravaged region?”

“Nothing else has ever been an option,” I said. My voice was getting smaller. I wrote about that a lot in my first journal to Brother, back when I was traveling around Cyrodiil. And I’d already come to the same conclusion a hundred times. “It’s my home. It’s where my parents are buried. I can’t just move on.”

There was a long moment where I could just feel Arcadia’s incredulous stare on me. I just kept my eyes on the paste I was making out of the canis and eggshells, studiously beating the ever-living shit out of it. I was almost expecting Arcadia to warn me not to break her pestle, since I was banging it mercilessly on the mortar like I was expecting to kill it.

She said nothing, so I continued, “It may not be the best life. It may not be easy, or even particularly happy. But I owe it to my family. They’ve always been the world to me, and if all I can do is try to keep what’s left of us together, and try to keep the family home, then I will.”

“I hope it’s worth it, then,” she mumbled.

I tossed in a few juniper berries, and started pounding them into the mixture. “I know it will be.”


	3. In Which She Fights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When in dire straights, the Dragonborn's until-now useless little sister has the chance to prove herself to the people of Whiterun. Maybe there's more to her than the shadow she stands in.

### Chapter Three

_3rd of Morning Star, 202_  
_Big Brother,  
Zeymah, do you know the word for ‘sister’? _

“It works!” Anoriath cried from the doorway of the Huntsman. Over his shoulder was a massive buck, which had been cleanly killed. No signs of struggle were clear on the Bosmer or his prize, which he carried effortlessly over the threshold and into the back room where he could skin and prepare the game. I had to skitter to the side to get out of his way, even stepping behind the counter beside Elrindir. “We’ll see how the meat is, and if we can sell it, but that was the easiest time I’ve ever had tracking it down. It moved so slowly, you’d have thought it was taking a stroll,” he said from the back.

I could feel myself beaming. Until now, I had never made poisons, and what I made was always sold immediately. I never got to know if my creations were effective. “The poison shouldn’t affect it now that it’s dead,” I said, stepping into the doorway to watch the Bosmer go about his work. “But I’d be willing to taste the meat first, if you’re worried that it could be—“

The offer died in my throat as I saw Anoriath lift a piece of bloody flesh, cut right from the arrow-torn shank of the beast, and without any inkling of hesitation, set the raw meat right into his mouth.

“Oh…” Gross. I wasn’t going to say so out loud to my much-appreciated host, though. And besides, my disgust was forgotten when the Bosmer flashed me a dripping red grin.

“This is perfect. It died calm and quiet. The flesh isn’t gamey at all. And the poison can’t be tasted, especially through the flavor of the heath the buck ate. Excellent.”  He pulled another bite out of the bloody mess. “Do you think you could make some more?”

“Of course!” I was eager to, in fact. Seeing Anoriath’s approval and Elrindir’s impressed expression made my whole body feel pleasantly light and flowy, like blossoms off the blooming Gildergreen.

“You definitely have a talent for alchemy,” Elrindir commented off-handedly, and despite myself, I felt my jaw drop. “What’s the matter?”

“You think I’m good?”

“The poison you made was flawless,” Anoriath said, wrist-deep in bloody carcass. “And everyone in town knows how much time you put into alchemy.”

My cheeks were getting red, and I wanted to pry for more compliments, but instead I humbly lowered by head and thanked them both. “I can make some more for you today. I’ll be at Arcadia’s Cauldron until she makes me leave.” Already I was turning about, reaching under Elrindir’s counter to snatch up my apothecary satchel. Its top flipped backwards so that I could rifle through sprigs of dried herbs, counting my inventory. Enough for another hunting trip, at least, I figured. A skip was in my step all the way out the door.

I hadn’t so much as stepped out of the Huntsman when I saw it. The morning sunlight was unusually red, as if the sky itself were stained. The air was hot and dry, nothing like I had felt since coming to Skryim. Living in the shadow of Kvatch, I grew up with too many stories about the sky going bloody and Oblivion breaking loose, and those nightmarish images were the first things in my mind. Armies of daedric villains came swarming through the city once, two hundred years ago, inspiring generations upon generations of stories to warn and control children. A childhood spent checking for daedroth under my bed stirred my imagination so that I was convinced instantly that the hordes of the Deadlands were spilling into Whiterun.

“Dragon!” I heard someone shout. I’m ashamed to admit that I felt relief at the revelation. Compared to a gate to Oblivion, I should think that a dragon wouldn’t be nearly so bad. The horrors of the legends of my childhood were worse than reality, as it turned out, and before I could think twice about it, I was walking toward the gates to get a better look.

I thought I would have been terrified, but I suppose putting it in perspective, a single lizard that could be beaten instead of a doorway into the maw of Mehrunes Dagon , well, I guess it made me think much less of the thing on the other side of the wall.

But more importantly, I could hear the guards shouting on the other side of the wall. I could hear Arvid screaming.

He was the guard who was often on duty in the market in the evening, and he would walk with me when I left Arcadia’s, since the Huntsman was on the way to the barracks. Sometimes I got the impression that he was sweet on me, until I’d seen how his eyes would linger on Olfina Gray-Mane’s backside through the slits in his helmet. If he were sweet on me, he’d be much sweeter if I were a Nord.

At any rate, hearing his cry out made my chest clench. If he got killed—if anyone got killed, I knew right then I would be heartbroken. The people who had once just been impartial acquaintances were now valuable to me in a way I’d never anticipated. The idea of Arvid, or Idolaf, or even batty old Heimskr getting hurt or killed turned my cool attitude into panic like the flip of a switch, and my leisurely pace toward the city gates sped into a sprint.

The gates should have been closed, but two guards were holding them open while reinforcements from the barracks came streaming out. Every single guard in the city, it seemed, was either rushing outside. A pair of gauntlet-clad hands grabbed me as I tried to run through with the guards. It was Leif, one of the usual gatekeepers. Through the shadows cast by his steel helmet, I couldn’t see what expression he wore, but his voice was confident and commanding. “Stay back! There’s a dragon out here!”

“I know!” I shrieked, looking past him to see smoke rising from just outside the outermost walls. “I need to get out there!”

“Your brother may be Dragonborn, but you would be killed!” Leif tried to yell at me.

There was just too much commotion for him to keep me in place, though. The sound of a terrible roar had Leif’s attention back toward where the fight was taking place. In an instant, he’d forgotten all about me, and by the time he looked back to where I had been, I was already running down through the outer bailey and out the front gate.

And there it was, the most massive monster I’d ever seen in my life. The fire it set to the stables was reflected off of every gem-like scale down the length of its body, so that it looked like a living, writhing flame given a solid shape. It opened its wings, blacking out the rising sun from me so that it felt like the guards and the gate and I were standing in a patch of forsaken, doomed night. Then, with a mighty sweep of spiked wings, the beast was propelled into the sky. A volley of arrows followed it, a few even sticking uselessly from where its natural plates overlapped.

The archers were busy trying to lead its movements through the sky, while those who had been engaging the creature from the ground were either reorganizing their ranks or floundering in confusion. A few were on the dirt, holding wounds or crying out. These were the only ones I saw.

I was on the ground between a pair of fallen soldiers, tearing through my satchel to bring out the vials of the most potent stuff I had. I was pouring it down their throats before they could tell me not to. “Give it a moment!” I gasped. “Let it take effect! You’ll thank me then!” As soon as the vials were empty I crawled along the ground to the next nearest soldier. I did this several times, alternating between passing small doses of healing potions and healing by hand. Nothing was more encouraging than when, after I left a soldier to go on to the next, they stood and went back into the fray. I knew then that the effort was really worth it. I continued on until I was now at one of the last soldiers left on the ground.

“What are you doing out here?” the voice beneath the helmet rasped. Arvid.

“Helping!” was all I could think to say. The chains in his armor were broken, revealing a huge gash of unprotected, scoriated flesh beneath. I pressed my hands to his wound and pushed outward with the warm sparks of magicka that slipped through my soul, out my skin, and into his body. Before our eyes, faster than I ever knew I could heal anyone, the gash closed.

“Mara!” he exclaimed softly. There wasn’t time to sit around and be amazed, though. We were suddenly in darkness, the sun having been blotted out by the returning dragon. Many more arrows protruded from its body and wings, but the thing only sounded angrier and no less determined.

On its long, serpentine neck, it swiveled its head to get a good look at all the enemies (or, as he probably saw us, tasty treats) remaining on the battlefield. When its searing eyes fell on me, I felt as though I’d been pierced with frostbite fangs.

“Mal Briinah-i,” he rumbled. At least, that was what it sounded like. I didn’t know the first thing about the language, just that I could barely keep from screaming when he addressed me.

Instead of scream, though, I lifted my hands and pushed my fear outward in a flurry of ice and frost. The dragon reeled and bucked before diving forward with teeth aimed or me.

I didn’t know that I could move so quickly, but I managed to scramble across the ground while a host of guards came on the monster together in a choreographed bull-rush. Another volley of arrows rained down from the wall, one in particular gauging the dragon’s eye.

My legs pushed from the ground so that I leapt right into a formation of guards. They didn’t pause, or maybe they didn’t notice that I’d joined their ranks, but from within them I began to draw a wall of rippling magic in front of us. The guards at first panicked, then grew exponentially bolder when a wave of heat and fire burned from the dovah’s mouth and was harmlessly repelled by my ward just a moment after I’d put it in place.

I felt myself get light-headed fast as the ward drained me of magicka. I screamed out a warning to the guards that surrounded me, though I couldn’t know if they heard me over the clatter of steel, the roaring of the attacker, or their own shouts. But all at once my ward was dissipated as I scrambled to lift a vial of fire salts boiled into a taproot tea from my satchel. It was one of my more expensive concoctions, and I’d honestly never considered drinking something that could have paid for a few good meals, but there was no time to fret over that.

Immediately I felt myself come alive with the essence of Aetherium that surrounded us, permeating our world and now whispering through my veins like a million possibilities just waiting for me to release. I shaped those possibilities in my mind, twisting the primordial power that bubbled inside of me like a potion over a cauldron, waiting, wishing to boil over until—!

I remember being snowed inside of the inn in Bruma, right before I had started my way into Skyrim, and seeing the maelstrom like nothing could possibly be worse than it. When the atmosphere was more snow than air, how could any worse blizzard even exist? I had watched it in amazement until the windows were packed with white.

What erupted from my hands put that blizzard to shame. It was like my hands had become portals to the very top of the Throat of the World, or the mouths of three frost-breathing dragons were breathing from between my fingertips at their heat-breathing brother. The blood that had begun to drip from between its scaled went rigid, and soon so too did its joints. It tried to open its wings to fly away, but the ice clung and froze around them so that, with the many holes pierced y arrows, it looked like a single massive snowflake.

I couldn’t enjoy my handiwork, though. Right when I realized the devastation I had caused, I was looking everywhere but the wyrm. “Is everyone alright?” I cried. “I didn’t get anyone in that, did I?!”

Not a single guard paid my questions any mind. Instead they went in for the kill, moving past me, driving swords and axes into its frozen flesh, hacking away as if it were an ice sculpture. I saw Arvid, and I knew it was him from the clawed-open mail revealing a pristine, unharmed stomach, climb atop the frozen dragon.

I screamed, something about him getting down from there before he got hurt (again), but my voice was now completely drowned out as the guard plunged his sword straight downward, though the top of the dragon’s head and then out from his chin and a massive cheer rose up. The ground beneath my feet trembled at the applause.

Only then, once the thing was completely and undeniably killed did any of the guards look at me again. I saw expectant looks through the narrow slits in their helmets, and when nothing happened save for the frozen lizard toppling down against the earth, they started to whisper.

“Not like her brother after all,” I heard one voice echo from a steel helm.

“I would have her by my side in any battle,” another said. “Dragonborn or not, she put me back on my feet.”

“That’s the biggest game I’ve ever had the pleasure of hunting,” said a much friendlier voice behind me. Up on the wall, with the biggest grin I’d ever seen on a man, Anoriath was un-nocking an arrow from his string. “To think, I missed it flying in by just a few minutes! I should have taken the long way back home!”

“I don’t think you’ll get to sell its meat,” I answered. I was feeling woozy. Was this what adrenaline could do to a person? 

“Well, with no Dragonborn in the area to turn its flesh to ash, I don’t see what else they’ll do with it!” the Bosmer laughed. It sounded positively mischievous, and wasn’t helped by the little wink he gave before slipping over the wall and out of sight.

I wouldn’t be following him back into the city, though. Instead, I looked out over the burnt landscape and made my way to where guards lay or sat. There wasn’t time to do too much for any one of them, but I handed all of the little vials I had in my satchel that would be of use, and poured healing magic into those who had serious wounds, at least so they would last long enough for Danica and her healers to patch them up properly.

“Where is she?”

“She’s over there, playing field medic. And doing a damn good job. She was healing people in the heat of battle, and even now she’s helping those who have fallen. The fight took longer than when we fought beside the Dragonborn, but unlike the battle at the guard tower, there has not been a single casualty reported! Many are wounded, of course, but no one has died!”

I knew they were talking about me, yet the only words I cared about were those spoken at the end. After a long, hard, terrifying battle, I felt my face split into a relieved smile. No one died. These new friends, these people I had grown to love, were all going to be alright.

“And you are the Dragonborn’s sister?” I heard, the speaker now standing directly over me. The face that leered down at me was one that I knew I was supposed to recognize, but… nothing came to mind. He was clearly human, but with the shadow cast by the blue hood on his robes, he almost might have been an Altmer. “I am Farengar Secret-Fire,” he said in a heavy Nord accent. “I am the court wizard at Dragonsreach.”

I wanted to ask why in Oblivion he wasn’t helping me heal these men, then, or why he hadn’t helped in the fight. Biting that all back, though, I gave my head a small nod. “It’s a pleasure,” I lied.

“But you are not Dragonborn yourself… it would have been inconsistent with the legends, but I had hoped that you shared your brother’s abilities. It would have been most fascinating.”

“Sorry,” I murmured. The man I was healing shifted uncomfortably at what he was inadvertently eavesdropping on.

“They say the dragon spoke to you, though? Is that true?” The last sentence was lower than the others, maybe with anticipation, maybe with just a hint of jealousy.

“It did… It must have met my brother,” I answered. Maybe I should have made them keep the dragon alive. It might have told me where he was.

Farengar’s brows lifted, and apparently what I was saying was so enthralling that the court wizard even lowered himself to kneel on the charred earth beside me. “Why do you say that? What did he say?”

“He said, something-Brina-something…” I answered with an annoyed twist of my mouth. “I don’t know. I don’t speak dragon.”

“But you caught the word Briinah?” he asked anxiously.

“Of course. He looked right at me and said my name. I wouldn’t miss that. So he must have met my brother, to have known something like that.”

“That’s your name?” he repeated. I was getting sick of this fast. “Your name is the dragon word Briinah?”

“Like the Brina Cross. I was born in a farm near Kvatch. Brina.”

“Oh.“ Farengar ‘s excited expression dropped at my perfectly ordinary explanation. “Briinah is the dragon word for sister, you know.”

It took biting my tongue to keep from saying something worse. With effort, I said through a strangled voice, “I don’t know. But my name is Brina. What, did you think my parents named me ‘The Dragonborn’s Sister’?”


	4. In Which She Drinks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You mix potions, right? Can you brew me an ale?"
> 
> Following the victory over the dragon, Brina gets a chance to become even more of a hero, this time by getting everyone in Whiterun drunk.

### Chapter Four

_10th of Morning Star_  
 _Big Brother,  
When Mother and Father died, I had to find you. I didn’t have any choice. The farm was left to you in the will, and the count was eager to take the farm into his own possession. I wasn’t in the will, he said, so I would be removed by force unless the true owner of the property came to claim it and gave me permission to stay. But you were gone by this point, and I had no idea where to begin looking. We got letters now and again, and occasionally you would come up in gossip, but I didn’t know even which direction to start. And since I didn’t know where you were, I couldn’t send word to you that Mother and Father had died._

_And, besides the fact that I was being forced from the family home, I needed you. I was alone and afraid, and while they were dying our parents insisted that you would come back to take care of me. I should have known better. What could ever bring you back home after you’d had that taste of adventure you’d always craved? You were gone, and the only way I’d find you was if I went out looking for you._

_I thought I’d always been far enough behind you that your misadventures wouldn’t need to affect me. Wherever I went, I was met with the destruction that you’d left in your wake, and people who adored you and hailed you a hero. But I never faced the foes you faced, nor did I ever see much danger beyond some hungry wildlife or the risk of exposure._

_Well, your crazy life has made contact with mine. I fought a dragon, Brother. I was there to see it die! I froze it solid with my magic, and I saved lives on the battlefield. When I’m ready to leave Whiterun to go looking for you again, if you don’t come back to Whiterun first, I think I’ll be ready._

To celebrate the victory last week, there was going to be a bit of a party, one which was mainly put together by the Drunken Huntsman and Bannered Mare. A few of the guards, including an unusually attentive Arvid, asked Arcadia and I to brew them some ale and, though at first it had started as a joke, soon Arcadia and I were rolling empty barrels into the Cauldron to prepare enough ale to put all of Whiterun under the table. My Huntsmen looked even more excited for the ale than any more of that poison I’d made for them before, and they eagerly financed the ingredients.

Of course, we couldn’t resist adding a little alchemical spice, so to speak. There was blue mountain flowers and lavender, which gave the brew an unusually sweet and, obviously, floral flavor. It was our hope that the more the guests drank, the less their hangovers would affect them. We’d see how that theory went the next morning, we joked.

Finally, the day of the celebration arrived, and Arcadia and I lifted mugs of ale to give our creation a try. One sip in and my mouth was stretched wide in a grin. Arcadia looked just as pleased.

“Delicious!” Arcadia crowed, filling her mug again.

I was about to do the same, until we both were startled by a heavy knock at the door. Now, it’s important to mention that the folk at Jorrvaskr mostly kept to themselves. But standing right outside the Cauldron was one of the biggest men I’d ever seen. In fact, I couldn’t even see the woman who had been standing behind him until after he ducked through the door.

“Hello, ladies,” the man said amiably. He didn’t introduce himself, but I had no doubt that he and his companion were, well, Companions. The man looked like he had coal smeared over his eyes. “Anything a big, strong man can do for--”

“We heard that you had some barrels that needed to be hauled or carried up to the Wind District,” the woman cut in humorlessly.

“Oh, yes. That would be tremendously helpful,” Arcadia said. “Are the Companions going to be taking part in the festivities tonight?”

“Of course!” the man said. “Hard to refuse a huge party with the entire city right outside our door. A few of us even made it to the fight with the dragon. Aela was up on the wall, even got an arrow in its eye!” He walked past us, up to a sealed barrel, and lifted it as if it weighed nothing. The woman behind him managed to pick up a barrel as well, and my jaw dropped to watch her. She had to have been strong as an ox! They weren’t kidding about these Companions!

“And I thought your brother was the strong one,” Arcadia observed, watching the man help the lady hoist her barrel over her shoulder without even putting his own down.

He cleared his throat, maybe because he didn’t know how to take the compliment, and might have even blushed a bit. His friend, meanwhile, had opened the door with her foot and was stomping across the market and out of sight.

As soon as he was out, too, Arcadia shot me a little smile. “Handsome, right? If you settled down, you wouldn’t need to go back to Kvatch, would you?”

“Non-issue,” I replied hastily. My face was going red, and it wasn’t just because of the ale we’d sampled. “I doubt he’d be interested in anyone outside their order.”

“Might be just as well,” she shrugged. “I’m sure you saw their eyes. Now, I make a living making potions to cure diseases, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what they’ve got. Do you think it’s some kind of Brown Rot?”

“I haven’t a clue,” I answered. “But if Danica hasn’t done anything about it, it must not be anything serious, right?”

Arcadia turned and began pounding the top of the last barrel into place. Just a moment later both of the Companions returned to take more barrels. Surely there would be enough for everyone, right?

A few hours later and all the stalls in the market were closing early. I walked arm-in-arm with Arcadia out of the Cauldron, and was stopped immediately by Arvid. Even behind his heavy metal helm, I swear I could see a grin on his face. “Almost all of the guards will be there!” he said. “But for the few that have to stay on duty, you’ll try and save some ale, won’t you?”

“I’ll do my best!” I promised. I was starting to walk again, but Arcadia was standing firmly in place, and holding my arm tight. When I cast a curious glance back at her, she lifted a brow and gave a sidelong look, up and down, of Arvid.

I still hadn’t the slightest clue what she was thinking, until she said, “You’ll be coming to the celebration, won’t you? Brina would love to dance with you!”

Oh. So that was what she was playing at. She really figured that if I got set up with someone, I wouldn’t leave, whether or not I found Brother again.

Arvid floundered a moment, but I could make out a few little sounds echoing through his helmet, like little syllables that he was stuttering over as a he tried to formulate an answer. “My shift ends at sundown,” he said at last.

“And there you are,” she said proudly as she turned me away and started walking again.

“Do you really think that setting me up will keep me here forever?” I asked incredulously. I ran my hand across the new dress that Arcadia had given me as a gift for the party. It was a lovely burgundy linen outfit, with a leather doublet that gave my chest some uncommon elevation. Damn her!

“I’m not about to lose my prodigal apprentice to her detached brother, even if he is the Dragonborn,” she replied curtly. “Besides, would it be so bad? You haven’t heard what they say about you and those Bosmer.”

Now my face was burning. “I don’t see—“

“Half of us know the story behind the Drunken Huntsman. Quite the Sanguinites, some people say. Throw a sweet little lady in the mix, and—“

“Oh, please! Anoriath and Elrindir? Sure, they love their mead, but I don’t see how that means—“

“You don’t have to see!” Arcadia said with finality. “But I think your chances of finding a husband would be much better if you picked a man before your reputation gets out of hand. And if you can get a Companion, that might be even better. A strong man with strong ties in the community, a good income, and no idea about the gossip? That would be most excellent.”

“You’re incorrigible.”

There was no hint of shame on her face. “I’m not about to lose my apprentice,” she said again. Then, under her breath, she added, “Maybe I should brew up a love potion…”

The square around the Wind District was already busy as I’d ever seen it. The steps leading to Jorrvaskr were crowded with Companions, almost all of them new faces to me. Not altogether the most social bunch, they were very slowly moving away from their hall and mingling with the other citizens. Heimskr wasn’t hollering about Talos, and instead was sitting contently in front of the Ninth Divine’s statue, mug of ale in hand. In fact, everyone had a mug. Our barrels hadn’t been up here ten minutes before Elrindir opened one up, and I saw Saadia handing out tankards by the armful. People were crowded together, and there were braziers all around, so that even in the midwinter evening I was itching to take my cloak off.

Music floated up from under the bright blossoms of the Gildergreen. Standing on a stone right in front of the tree, Jon Battle-Born was strumming a lute and singing a ballad. With a shout from the crowd for a more cheerful song to fit the occasion, Jon showed off a charming smile and heartily agreed. The tempo picked up, and all around him the people began to dance in carefree circles.

Before long, I had a half-emptied mug in my hand as I sat on the steps to Jorrvaskr, and was sharing my perspective of the dragon story with the Companions. I never imagined that, in a million years, a bunch of warriors would care about what I had to say, or that I would be telling a story of an epic battle to begin with. But there I was, describing the copper-scaled monster as it looked right at me and said what I had thought was supposed to be my name.

“An alchemist standing right in front of it, and where was I?!” a companion, who looked almost just like the one who’d carried our ale, complained. “Out chasing some skeevers from a farm!” The others crowded around all laughed, some of them expressing very similar laments.

“There’s always next time,” I assured him with a salute of my mug. What was I saying? There wouldn’t be a next time! I wasn’t crazy enough to run into another dragon attack! Yet every sip of ale I took, the more I thought I wouldn’t mind another bout. I could take on ten dragons, said my swimming mind.

He laughed and patted my shoulder, nearly sending me straight down the steps with the weight of his hand combined with my swirling inner-ears. “Next time it is!”

Time moved unnaturally quickly after that. It became hard to keep track of where I was and what I was doing once I got to the bottom of that mug.

I don’t remember how (my memory starts getting fuzzy about this point), but I ended up back close to the Gildergreen again. My cloak was gone now, but with all the fire and people and ale, I didn’t miss it. And I was spinning. It was hard to see straight, but I finally realized that it was Arvid twirling me around with the music, his crystalline blue eyes sparkling through a thick fringe of golden lashes. His blond hair was cropped short like was popular with Imperial soldiers, though his features couldn’t have been any more Nord.

Far from what I expected, our dance was cut short by a thickly muscled arm wrenching itself between us. “You’re the one who killed the dragon, right boy?” the twin Companion rumbled. “You can’t be claiming every victory, you know. I’ll take the lady from here.”

I don’t know where Arvid went after that, and it didn’t occur to me to ask. My new dancing partner wasn’t quite as graceful as Arvid, but he could follow the rhythm. His hands were enormous, fitting around me like, I imagined, the paws of a bear. Also, I’m ashamed to say I had no idea which of the twins this was. I was far too drunk to have been able to tell a difference and, in my defense, I hardly knew either of them to begin with. “Ever thought of becoming a Companion?” he asked. I laughed outright.

“I could barely lift a sword, let alone swing one.”

“I’ll teach you sometime.”

“When you decide you have a free afternoon to watch me cut my own toes off, come find me!”

Once again, I was spinning and twirling, keeping my eyes listlessly unfocused to avoid getting sick. His huge hands were very comforting, and the way I craned my head up to look at him made me feel like a child. Strangely, I didn’t mind it. It made me feel safe, being small in this big man’s arms. I thought about what Arcadia had said, and began to really consider it… Safe in the arms of a Companion husband…

“What in Oblivion are you doing?” was the next thing I remember. I’d ended up down on the steps into the Plains District. Since most of the city had come out for the festivities, even the large square of the Gildergreen had filled to capacity, and there were people pouring out every direction. We were hardly alone, but I was confused as to why I was suddenly so far from the dancing. Where had my partner gone? I turned my head to look, and my mind seemed to continue turning until my vision was blurred and my brain was whirling inside my skull.

“I… what are you doing?” I sputtered out.

“Do you remember the talk we had just a few hours ago?! About you and your reputation?!” Arcadia looked very stern. I could definitely see my mother in her now. Oh, that little vein, right by her eye, flickered just like my mother’s used to. I was too distracted by that to be properly concerned.

“I don’t undershta-“

“You’ve kissed four men!” she scolded me, even bopping my nose painfully. “Almost dragged that Companion into an alley, and he was ready to follow you!”

“The big one?” That didn’t sound so bad. He was nice.

“The Dunmer!”

There had been a Dunmer Companion? How long ago since I’d been dancing with the big, nice one?

“How much have you had to drink?” She was leaning over me, checking my pulse and my temperature. I didn’t think being drunk worked quite like an illness, but I couldn’t formulate the words to tell her that. “Ugh, just… stay right here! Right here, don’t move! I’m going to get a potion for you!”

And I stood there on the step, wobbling back and forth with the wind. I imagined I was being breathed back and forth by the temple of Kynareth. And after it felt as though I’d been waiting a while, I turned my eyes up to the sky. No, there was no threat of me crying, I just felt like counting the stars, but I kept losing track of which I’d counted or got distracted by the vibrant red and green auroras streaming through the sky like banners of opposing armies.

“You made this ale?” someone said behind me. People love starting conversations from behind. It was someone even newer to the city than I was. I’d never seen him before, this short Breton man, but he looked merry. He dressed in simple black robes like a mage, and wore his jaw-length hair casually parted down the middle of his crown. I remember being very impressed by his hair. It looked soft.

“I did,” I said proudly. With a glance down the steps, toward the market, I added, “Sho did my mashter… She should be back shoon…”

“Well, this is some of the best I’ve ever drank,” he congratulated me, even lifting his tankard in a toast.

“Thash grape!” That didn’t sound right even to me.

“Listen, don’t worry about Arcadia,” the stranger said, taking my hand to lead me back into the heart of the festivities. “I’ll keep an eye on you. And you, my dear, can feel free to kiss me as much as you like!”

_Dear Big Brother,  
Never in my youth was I courted. Any young man who dared show interest naturally had to contend with you, both literally and figuratively. Always, you were the standard of what a man should be: strong, witty, quick, graceful, charming. You set my expectations extremely high._

_Whether or not they were able to compete with you in any of those ways, they most often had to face you in other ways. Eager suitors would be turned away at the door with bloody noses and dislocated shoulders._

_So, while I was heartbroken that you left to serve in the Imperial Legion, part of me did hope that maybe I might get some attention from the boys again. It was not to be, of course, since even though you were gone, no one felt safe with me. Any minute, they thought, you would come crashing in. You could be hundreds of miles away, and the y would be glancing over their shoulders before so much as touching my hand. Nothing lasted longer than a couple weeks before my suitors would get paranoid or decide it just wasn’t worth it. And, with no dowry to speak of, and our parents having only a modest farm to boast over, there wasn’t enough about me to make the dangers to their health worthwhile. When one man finally did decide he would take the risk, luck would have it that you returned home from your defection-gone-rogue stunt two weeks later. I never saw Iulius again after that, but the gossip was that you had threatened to kill him if he ever came near me again. I didn’t think that was like you, of course. I couldn’t imagine you killing someone for no reason. So instead of being heartbroken, or lonely, or feeling angry with you for violently separating me from my first lover, I took pride in the fact that my Big Brother was the strongest, toughest, and most respected man in the village._

_No one could match up to you, and you wouldn’t let anyone get the chance to prove otherwise. No man would ever overshadow your role in my life, and you seemed intent on keeping it that way. Now, I’ve been without you for years, but you’ve still been the only one of importance to me._

_But that’s changing. I don’t know if I’m sad about that, or if I think you’ll come out of the woodwork again, just like last time._

Our theory that high quantities of the drink would prevent a hangover was only slightly true. When awareness once again crept through me and informed me of the ache in every limb, I at least didn’t feel the need to drown myself. For a long time, what felt like many hours, I laid there with my eyes closed, letting my consciousness slowly creep into place…

It was unusually warm for wintertime, and in fact, even a big suffocating. Then I realized I could feel… Oh, sweet Mara. I felt flesh on either side of me. I dared to open my eyes, and saw that it was none other than Anoriath directly in front of me, one arm thrown over my shoulder. Mustering my courage, I glanced behind me to see Elrindir. Blankets covered the three of us in my large bed, but I could feel quite well enough that none of us were wearing any clothing to speak of.

Oh, sweet Mother Mara. How did this happen? I couldn’t remember even getting back to the Huntsman at all!

Both the Bosmer on either side of me were completely unconscious and neither showed signs of waking. Wiggling and scooting down the bed was uncomfortable at first, but definitely preferable to jostling them any other way that might have roused them.

Once I was out of the bed, I could get a good look at the men who had taken me in. I owed them so much, since they’d been giving me a home and practically a family— Did I just think that? Family?

Their sharply angled features had become as familiar to me over the last few weeks, until it almost felt like I was looking on two new brothers. There was no disgust, strangely enough. Shock, to be sure, but I wasn’t repulsed by the idea of having slept with them. Never occurred to me as a possibility before now, and certainly not the both of them at once, but I trusted them more than anyone else in Whiterun, maybe even all of Skyrim. They were family now. I guess there was no one else I could imagine being so close with, when it came right down to—

I was pulled from my sentimental mind-babble by a sound downstairs. Thuds and the shuffle of boots, which I cursed to be an unfortunately timed customer. I threw a dress over my shoulders and nearly leapt down the steps and into the Huntsman proper, barely decent by the time I made it into view of the man in the main room.

Lacing up his boots near the last glowing embers at the hearth, the Breton man from the night before flashed me a positively devilish grin. “Oh, sweetheart, good morning! Long night, eh? Nothing personal, me slipping away before you or the others woke up, but I figure since they won’t remember a thing anyway…”

“You were here last night?”

His smile twisted into something more like a leer. “I was. All night.”

“What happened?”

“Exactly what it looks like, sweetheart. Exactly what it looks like!” The way he stood made me think he must still have been drunk. Each step carried a sway the way sailors roll their weight when walking on a boat, back and forth with non-existent waves. “Now, m’dear, I have a party to get to. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way. But don’t think I’ll be forgetting about you!” he said, aiming an index finger right through my body and into my soul. A shiver shook its way down my spine. “I’ll see you next time.”

“Next time?” I repeated dumbly.

“Oh, yes!” he guffawed. The Drunken Huntsman door flew open just a fraction of a second before his hand touched the handle. Maybe my eyes were just playing tricks on me, especially with the burning, mind-numbing morning sun that poured in from the open doorway. I swore for just a moment that the scenery on the other side of the door didn’t match the Whiterun landscape I was used to. “Until then, sweetheart!”

And he was gone. Just like that. The door closed behind him, and it felt like all of the air had left with him. Whoever he was, the whole building was resonating with the echoes of every word he had said, every breath he had taken. Everything was electrified by his presence, though the buzz was slowly dimming as he got further and further away. I wanted to follow him—it had only then occurred to me that I didn’t even know his name—but the idea of following him was terrifying in a way that I couldn’t quite rationalize.

I must have been pondering him for half an hour before Anoriath came stomping his way down the stairs. His usual grace and silent steps were replaced by heavy footfalls in irregular timing. Normally warm, friendly eyes were caked with sleep and half-closed, while around his waist a sheet from my bed kept him covered from the waist down. “I’m sorry,” he murmured painfully, “Elrindir and I must have commandeered your bed. Any idea why we’re naked as the day we were born?” He sat clumsily exactly where the Breton had been sitting. “What happened?”

“I haven’t got a clue,” I said. Well, I did have a clue at this point, and a fair amount of solid evidence, but it might be better this way. Just less complicated. Then I lied, just to keep things simple, “I woke up down here.”

“Ah. Sorry.” He ran his hands over his face and smoothed them back over his loose hair. I held my breath as I wondered if he was going to get suspicious over why he had woken up in bed, naked, with his brother, but it must not have been strange enough to warrant the concern. “The ale was good. Doesn’t prevent hangovers like you and Arcadia were trying to brew it to do. But it was damn good.”

“Thank you. That means a lot to me.”

“Hm…” Anoriath curled in on himself, leaning his face down to his knees. If he didn’t hum in pain every few minutes, I would have thought he fell asleep again.

The eastern side door of the Huntsman opened up, shining sunlight straight into the room. Anoriath groaned, stood, and wobbled his way back into his own bedroom, where I could hear the thud and creak of furniture.

Arcadia walked in with enough grace and ease that I wanted to smack her. Had she not gotten drunk at all?! My only relief came when she looked at me, not with derision (since I was certain that she had come to scold me), but with a pleased smile.

“I just wanted to let you know that I’m proud of you.” Her kind Imperial voice wasn’t as painful to my increasingly pounding ears as I had expected. “You had several men ready to throw you over their shoulders and run off with you, but you came right back home. You did have to be carried, of course, but it was just Anoriath and Elrindir.” Despite the gossip she had apparently heard, her quick dismissal of the Bosmer told me that she really didn’t think there was anything to be worried about. And I suppose not, if no one remembered or knew. “Of the people who aren’t holed up in their homes hissing at the sunlight, no one minded your antics. Nazeem offered to send us bushels of wheat to make more ale, in fact. Oh, and…”

Her blisterwort-stained hands dipped into the satchel at her hip and produced a folded piece of parchment. The folds were worn and creased, telling me that she had read the letter many times before it ever came into my hands. I hadn’t even started reading before she continued, “Now, this doesn’t mean that you’re done being my apprentice. I’m not about to give you up to anyone, except maybe, just _maybe,_ a husband.”

_Brina-_  
 _Honningbrew Meadery…_  
 _…new recipe…_  
 _…your reputation…_  
 _…show promise..._  
 _…offer you a position at the meadery …  
_

The letter dropped from my limp hand, but my eyes were locked on Arcadia. “What is this…?”

“Sabjorn wants to see how you can improve his business. Either making new recipes, or improving his methods, or even just another hand that he meadery. He doesn’t seem to want to pay much, but it’ll be something.” The master alchemist took a seat at the small table next to the wall, and gestured for me to join her. Arcadia began to pick idly at an old piece of cheese that had been sitting out overnight, and once I’d sat across the table from her, she continued, “You’ll only be helping him a few days a week. He came to me first, and I informed him that you would remain, first and foremost, my apprentice. But he’s a business man, and he knows that there is much to gain by having a talented alchemist in his meadery.”

The cheese crumbled under her fingertips, the smell wafting its way to me and turning my stomach. I had to look away. “Do you think…?”

“I think you should take the opportunity,” Arcadia said without missing a beat. “You know I would want you to do anything that would keep you from leaving the moment your leg is strong enough to carry you out of Whiterun. It’s not as noble as curing the sick, but you’re being recognized for your talents. Take the offer.”


	5. In Which She Works at Honningbrew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brina's more at home in Whiterun than ever, but she's not going to find the Dovahkiin by getting comfortable and settling down. Her time in the city is almost up, and it's not going to be pretty. In the meantime, she's got herself a little work at Honningbrew Meadery. What could possibly go wrong?

### Chapter Five

_24th of Moring Star,_  
 _Big Brother,  
It’s been months, and you still haven’t come back to Whiterun. I’m wondering if you ever will. I’m wondering if I’ll ever look for you again. This place is more and more home to me every day that passes, and while I can’t imagine just giving up on finding you after all this time, I’m happy. There are people I love here, men coming into the Huntsman to see me, Arcadia’s warm hearth, and now the meadery. It’s getting harder to think about leaving, no matter how strong my leg gets._

“Alright,” I said, taking one step down on the little ladder beside the vat of boiling mead. I bit down on a few extra juniper berries, and tossed one into Eimar’s open mouth. My aim had gotten better since I first started, that was for sure; it plunked right on his tongue, and he chomped down on it hungrily.

The golden-haired Nord Eimar was quickly becoming a dear friend of mine, since we had a lot to talk about. Living in poor conditions, impoverished, just waiting for things to come together like he hoped… I knew exactly how he felt. Before I would head back to the Huntsman at the end of the night, we often spent hours just sitting alone in the boilery, talking about everything we’d been through. He wasn’t as bad off as Mallus, or worked as hard, but he had a completely different attitude than the bitter, always-sour Imperial did. Even if Eimar were the one in debt to Sabjorn (oh, yes, there was a ton of juicy gossip that I was being let in on), he would still have handled the entire thing differently. His positive demeanor was contagious.

“How does it feel, making ‘potions’ to be bottled up and sent out all across Skyrim?” he said through a mouthful of berry. 

“It feels wonderful. Maybe my brother will come looking for me if he sees my name on labels all across the province.” 

Eimar laughed, his voice a light-hearted trill that echoed through the high-ceilinged boilery like a chorus of songbirds. It was enough to lift the heaviest of hearts, really. “Well, if that’s the case, I’ll try to convince Sabjorn to credit you with the recipe. It’s not something he’d normally do, I don’t think, but it’s only fair.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “Sabjorn was very kind to let me work here, but it’s not because he’s noble or eager to share the credit for his mead. Anyway, Brother already has a dozen or more reasons to come back to Whiterun.”

With each day, I was getting more attached, and even dreading what I would do when Brother came back. I had to return to Kvatch with him. Too many years had been spent devoted to that end to be abandoned now. But I knew it would break my heart to leave this place. It was home.

“Go tell Sabjorn that this batch will be ready in the morning. We can start bottling it immediately,” I said, and Eimar obediently nodded and hurried out. Thinking I was alone, I stepped back up to the vat and peered inside, watching the amber liquid boil itself into a frothy sheet on top. It looked delicious, and I wondered what kind of magic could be done by brewing potions in one of these containers. Just imagining the quantities of potent elixirs that could be made brought a little smile to my face. If Arcadia and I could get our hands on a single boiler vat…

“Any reason you’re still in here?” an accusing voice said from behind me, making me start so violently that I thought for a moment I might tumble right into the boiling mead. People love to start conversations from behind.

“Oh! Mallus!” I breathed, turning around to face the grouchy Imperial. Sometimes I wondered if he purposefully made himself look worse just to keep his self-pity in place. His clothes were dirty, his long hair unwashed and discoloring the collar of his shirt with oil. Now, I knew what it was like to be impoverished, to have your fate controlled by someone who didn’t care one bit about you, to be hungry and aching for a real bed and bath… But I never let myself get so defeated.

To me, Mallus represented what I could never let myself become. I let my brother be the center of my life, I spent every coin I’d ever had trying to keep up with him (until recently), and I lived in some awful conditions over the last four years. But I would never let myself hate the world for my decisions or misfortune. Sure, Mallus had a single person to blame for his fate. But I like liked to fancy myself a better person than to have let myself obsess over it too negatively.

The surly man walked in, tossing a knapsack on the floor and waving me away from the ladder. “I have work to do, and you’re in the way.”

“I work here, too,” I argued. I wish I could have sounded as bold as I wanted, but something about the coldness of his eyes and the hard set of his mouth made my voice go meek and my chest clench like I was an inch away from a fist on my nose.

If he heard me, he didn’t show it, and when I didn’t move from the ladder, he grabbed me by the arm and led me down with a firm tug. “Work here? You come to visit a few days a week to play alchimist and come up with new recipes that we don’t need. Go tell Sabjorn you’re done for the day. I’m taking over from here.”

My mouth opened to snap back at him, but no sound came out. Instead, just a frightened squeak and a little sigh of defeat whimpered through my nose, and I was skittering across the floor like a frightened mouse. Something about Mallus just put me so on edge. I can’t say there are many people in the world who I hate, but I suppose, for too many reasons, Mallus would be one.

Back in the main building of the meadery, Sabjorn was cleaning off the bar for the night and gathering orders that had arrived from taverns and inns across the province. He looked up at me with a piqued brow when I pushed my way through the door, red-faced and breathing heavily. “Everything alright? Eimar made it sound like you had everything under control.”

“Fine… fine…” I grumbled. “Malice commandeered the boiler from me.” Even if no one caught on to it, I made a point of saying Malice instead of Mallus. It just sounded better off my tongue.

“Well, I have some news for you. In a few weeks, Commander Caius will be here to sample some mead, and I was even thinking of including a few of your new recipes.” His wrinkled face shot me a little smirk; he looked very proud of himself, especially, I figured, because he must have felt like such a saint for including me. “You should be there.”

“Of course, sir,” I replied, my mood instantly improving. “I wouldn’t miss it!” The guards had all raved about the ale Arcadia and I had made, and we’d saved a whole barrel to be sent to the barracks the next day. If anyone’s opinion of my concoctions would mean the most to me, it was the commander of the guards.

_17th of Sun’s Dawn  
What is it they say about all good things, Brother?_

Crackles of electricity glimmered between by open fingers, running up the space between them like spider’s webs before fizzling away into the air. Working with lightning always made my hair poof upward with static, much to my frustration. My curly Imperial hair didn’t need any help getting unruly, that was for certain. All morning I had been zapping rats down between the barrels in the meadery, which not only made me sick to my stomach, but had me always glancing into the main room to be sure that Commander Caius hadn’t entered to see this fiasco. Hopefully it would be under control when he arrived. No one wanted to think about what would happen if he saw this.

_Ziipp—_

Another skeever keeled over with a series of twitches. A shiver ran down my spine at the sight, and the taste of bile hit the back of my mouth. Why couldn’t the cool detachment I had when freezing the dragon have stuck? Maybe I wasn’t sickened by that because I hadn’t actually been the one to end it.

“You can relax now,” I heard Sabjorn say from the other room. He sauntered in, a confident smirk playing on his thin lips. In preparation for Caius’s visit, the Honningbrew owner had what little was left of his hair combed neatly against his head and wore his finest clothes. “I’ve hired someone to poison the pests.”

“Poison?” That was new. Why didn’t he tell me he needed poison? I could have taken care of that with ease. “I could have poisoned them for you. And you wouldn’t have had to pay any extra for it.”

“And let you fill my business with any sort of toxic sludge?” Sabjorn hissed. “This way, I know it’s not some strange alchemical experiment that might get into the mead. I won’t have you contaminating anything. Now, clean yourself up. The commander will be here in a few hours. You do have a nicer dress, don’t you? Go back home and find something cleaner to wear.”

That was Sabjorn for you. I pursed my lips and nodded stiffly. On my way out, I made sure to brush past him, and it brought a smile to my face to feel the static pass from me to him and to see him start with the shock.

When I returned, I was dressed with unusual formality in a blue dress and a silver necklace complete with a round pendant sitting right at the top of my décolletage. The fur lining was courtesy a few rabbits caught by Anoriath, and made me feel even more overdressed. My thick black hair fell in its natural curls, held away from my face by a length of ribbon. While I felt embarrassingly overdressed, Sabjorn gave me a critical appraisal upon my arrival, at last waving me behind the bar in a gesture of what I assumed was approval. He hadn’t told me to leave again, so I must have been acceptable.

The sound of voices outside quieted the four of us, Sabjorn, Eimar, Malice, and myself, and we all turned to look at the door with anticipation. Commander Caius entered with two guards, Leif and Ismo, none of whom were wearing their usual helmets. Leif, of course, was a guard usually on duty at the gates, and Ismo often patrolled outside of the city, on the road between Whiterun proper and the western watchtower. For a long time, I had believed he was the only one who knew when I was living in the abandoned farmhouse.

Once I had joined Sabjorn on the other side of the bar, he whispered to me, “Thank the nine he’s late! The man I’d hired to rid us of the skeevers just left not but five minutes ago! Would have been hard to explain…” Then, with a clearing of his throat, he announced jubilantly, “Ah, Commander Caius, always a pleasure, milord! Welcome to the Honningbrew Meadery! I trust you’re ready to acquaint yourself with our newest brews!”

“Of course,” the Commander said. Despite getting invited to try out our latest recipes, he didn’t look all that happy about it. Instead, Leif and Ismo were glancing at me excitedly. They must have been invited to come along as some sort of reward, because they were far more interested than the Commander. “Now that you’ve taken care of your little pest problem, I think I can stand to give it a try.”

His mention of the skeevers brought an audible gulp from both me and Sabjorn. From the corner of my eye, I swore I saw Malice smirk. Maybe it was relief that the skeevers were all indeed done for. 

“Yes, well,” Sabjorn said, not letting any of the discomfort that was clearly stamped across his face come through in his voice. “Help yourself, milord. We have three new recipes for you to try. We have our new juniper berry mead, a jazbay mead, both concocted by dear Brina here, and finally, our finest brew yet. I call it Honningbrew Reserve!”

The two guards standing behind Caius wetted their lips and nodded eagerly, but Caius scrunched his mouth. “This isn’t some wine to be sipped and savored, Sabjorn. This is mead!”

“Oh, certainly. But I do think you will be pleasantly surprised…~”

The tankard of fresh Honningbrew reserve went up to the Commander’s lips, and all as one, we held our breaths. I rolled the silver pendant around my neck in my hands, watching Caius’s face like a voyeur until—

The heavy tankard fell to the ground in a loud clatter, spraying Honningbrew reserve across the floor. Eimar immediately turned to fetch a mop, and when I turned to watch him go, I saw Malice’s face twisted into a cold, sardonic grin. It could curdle milk, that look.

“By the eight!” Commander Caius yelled furiously. “What’s in this?!”

Completely by instinct, I began to sink behind the counter to hide, but Sabjorn caught me by the arm and kept me at least visible from the shoulders up. “I—I don’t know!” Sabjorn said helplessly. “What’s wrong?”

“You assured me this place was clean! I should have known better, after it was riddled with filth!”

Behind the Commander, both the guards were staring with jaws dropped and confused expressions, and I saw Ismo mouth something to Leif along the lines of, “We still get some mead, right?”

“No! Wait, I beg you, this is not what it…!” The Nord’s old, cold eyes found me, still trying to curl up behind the counter. It wasn’t out of guilt, of course, but I just didn’t handle this kind of tension well. I should have known Sabjorn would use it, though. He gave my arm a harder tug, pulling me up like a prize from behind the bar and presenting me to the Commander. “It was her! It was her and all of her alchemical nonsense! She poisoned my mead!”

Suddenly, Malice was right in the middle of the fray, with a tight grip on my other arm. He tugged me the other direction. “Take some damn responsibility, Sabjorn! Your shoddy practices and your carelessness are finally coming back on you! Don’t blame the poor girl!”

Welp, if I wasn’t shocked and afraid before, I was now. I was being accused of poisoning the Commander of the Guard, and Malice was being kind to me. Sheogorath must have been hiding somewhere in the room.

“I didn’t poison anyone!” I squeaked. No one gave any indication that I was heard.

“I’ve never brewed a bad batch of mead in my life! It changed when she got here! It must have been her! Bringing all kinds of toxins!” Sabjorn gave me a hard enough tug that I was torn from Malice’s grip and sent right over the top of the bar.

Leif dove forward, catching me so that I didn’t land painfully on the floor, but my relief was short-lived.

“Take her to Dragonsreach Dungeon,” Commander Caius said. “She is a known alchemist and poison-maker, and Sabjorn is right. Nothing like this ever happened before she came here.” 

“What?! No!” Malice hollered. “Sabjorn is using her as a scapegoat! He’s been letting this place go to shit, and letting skeevers nest up! He’s the one who needs to go to be locked up!”

“Fine!” Caius growled. “Boys, take Sabjorn, too. They’ll both be in irons until we can figure this out.”

Malice wasn’t as intent on saving me as he was incriminating Sabjorn, apparently, because as soon as Ismo brought a gauntleted hand down on the owner’s shoulder, all his cries in defense of me were silenced. It wasn’t until we were out of the meadery and moving across the moonlit road back into Whiterun proper that Leif said, “All due respect, Commander, but are you sure we should be arresting two people for an uncertain crime? We have no actual reason to believe that Brina was responsible, save for the testimony of the person whose neck is on the line.”

Sabjorn started to complain, but was silenced by the pommel of Ismo’s sword in his back. He stumbled forward a few steps while Ismo shot me a satisfied look. He wouldn’t let Sabjorn get away with blaming me. He would make sure Sabjorn paid, one way or another. I smiled his way, and the young guard sent me a stealthy little wink.

“I’ll figure it out,” Commander Caius said dismissively. “But for now, we can’t let either of them go. One of them poisoned the mead I drank.”

“We could have tasted it, too,” Ismo offered. “You know, given you a second opinion.”

“You’ll get mead some other time. Now, shut your mouths and get these prisoners to Dragonsreach.”

The dungeon itself wasn’t all that bad. I was surprised by how well-lit and relatively warm the cells were. The bed set in the corner of the cell was shockingly clean. This was certainly better than some of the places I’d lived.

When Leif locked the door behind me with a bone-chilling _clink!_ of metal, pity filled his bright cerulean eyes. “You’ll be out of here as soon as we can convince the Commander that he can’t contain you. I don’t believe for a second that you would poison the mead, intentionally or otherwise. You’re too good of an alchemist to accidentally sully a whole meadery.”

“I appreciate it, Leif…” I whispered back. My voice echoed through the little stone room, like a hundred different versions of me were speaking from every flagstone. “I hate to ask this of you, but could you please let Arcadia know I’m here. And Elrindir and Anoriath. They’ll worry if I just disappear.”

“I’m sure word will get around to them,” Leif answered sullenly. “Ismo is already telling all the guards what happened, and I’m sure the news will spread like wildfire through the barracks.”

And that’s how I learned that Nords knew what wildfire was. It never occurred to me that a people who farm in the permafrost would be familiar with the concept. You learn something new every day, it’s true.

“I’m not sure if I should be happy about that,” I confessed.

“You should!” Leif showed off a dashing smile of amazingly straight teeth. “Neither of us thinks you should have been dragged off at all! And we’ll make sure that no one else does, either. Commander Caius will have to let you go, or have a whole lot of angry guards on his hands.” He put one hand through the bars, and I took it in both of mine. “Don’t be afraid. Now, give me just a minute. I’ll bring you some food.”

What he brought me was a bowl full of stew, which must have been intended as dinner for the guards, and a little metal cup filled to the brim with wine. I slept in relative comfort, having been given an extra blanket, and was checked in on all night long by the various guards on duty, all of whom gave me words of encouragement and assured me I wouldn’t be in for long.

But then another few nights rolled around, and the guards’ optimism was replaced by worried sighs and disgruntled comments to one another in passing. My meals became bigger, heartier, and served alongside remorseful frowns and long, meaningful looks that chilled my bones like the kiss of an ice wraith. I overheard something about civil unrest, and Sigrund calling for Caius to step down. Other cells began to fill up, though I could ever tell who was joining me. The jarl’s son wandered through the dungeon one night, smirking and saying something about the lady being right, that I was the perfect string to pull, whatever that meant. Never before had I ever felt so out of the loop. The world outside my stone cell was a churning hurricane, but I was only ever afforded glimpses of the storm that apparently I was the center of. To say it was confusing was a painful understatement. My prison felt more and more like a, well, _prison_ every day. Slowly, a sense of nonsensical guilt crept its way through my skull, and the torches burned dimmer and dimmer each night.

I heard Arvid come storming in one night, after I’d been in the prison about five days, on a tirade about “unjust, idiotic  claims.” His rants were out of sight of my cell, but he came directly to me once he’d finished ranting to the other guards on duty, and kissed my forehead through the bars.

“Someone is getting away with murder, while you rot in here,” he hissed. “Caius thinks since he already has someone in prison, he doesn’t need to investigate. Well, you can’t be guilty of every crime that happens in this city. And he’s going to answer for this.”

“Answer for what?” I wanted to cry. I’d been living in this cell for days now, and all the gossip I’d heard out of context did nothing to restore my hope.

“Poison.” Arvid’s voice dropped, and I had to lean through the bars to hear him. “Someone was poisoned. But Caius says it was you. That you must have placed the poison before the incident at Honningbrew, and justice is already being served. No one believes it, though, and somewhere out there, whoever really poisoned Anoriath is free!”

“Anoriath?!” My heart stopped. The world spun around me, and a cold wind knocked me off of my feet.

The screeching sound of the cell door opening broke through my confusion. Before I knew what was happening, I was kneeling on the floor with Arvid in the cell with me, his arms wrapped around my shoulders. “I’m so sorry,” he kept saying. I hadn’t even asked if Anoriath was alright, but that phrase told me everything. “I’m so, so sorry.”

My eyes went upward, and I started counting the stones in the ceiling to keep from crying. They all looked the same, so I counted to five over and over again. Why five? The number burned in my mind, a soft chuckle ringing through my ears from behind a faraway door across the castle. I suppose grief was making me lose my mind a bit, but I promise, that is just how I remember that moment.

“See? I knew it! I knew there was no way it could have been you! You had no idea! And here you are, being kept in prison, because Caius said it must have been you! And he said that this incident proves you were the one to have poisoned the mead, too! Damn it! Anoriath’s killer is out there somewhere, and here you are being punished for the death of your friend! No one believes you did it! Any of it!”

“Then why am I here?” I choked through a lump in my throat.

“Depends on who you ask,” the guard answered bitterly. “Your brother’s made some enemies with the Thalmor, and many are saying that you being held is at the behest of the spike-ears to try to get your brother out where they can find him. Sigrund thinks Caius is too deep in the pocket of the Empire, and is being used for their political games. Even people who used to support the empire are changing their tunes, now that it’s clear that no one is safe regardless of guilt or involvement. The Battle-Borns and Grey-Manes haven’t agreed on anything in a long time, but now almost the whole city is flying the Stormcloak colors.”

Bile bit at the back of my mouth. My staunchly Imperial mouth. “Madness!” I breathed.

“Not even the half of it,” Arvid said. “Gossip is everywhere. Some say that Anoriath was killed by the Dark Brotherhood! Sure, he talked about things that a few people didn’t want to get out, but assassins? Over that? And Caius won’t even investigate! Arcadia marched right up to the Jarl, and told him that the poison used had to have been made from ingredients not native to the area, and that she hasn’t had in stock in ages. And, she said, if it were one of your potions, she would know. But Caius said her testimony was worthless, since she had a special interest in defending you. There have been riots in the lower district. And even guards are being insubordinate. Meanwhile, Nelkir has been going on about Caius talking to some woman who’s been making him make all these ludicrous decisions. Keeps on saying, ‘pull one thread and watch it all unravel.’ The boy is at least as crazy as Caius, anyway.”

“This just sounds like…” I couldn’t even think what. It was too preposterous to make any sense of. The fact that Anoriath was dead was earthshaking enough, but every piece of information that had been stacked on top of that revelation left me more and more lost.

Arvid kissed my forehead again. “I’m so sorry. But it won’t be long.”

“Before what?” Air stopped in my lungs as I held my breath for an answer I knew I wasn’t ready for.

Mercifully and cruelly all at once, Arvid kept it simple. “Hush. Just wait. I promise you’ll be okay. One more night, and Galmar Stone-fist will march on Whiterun.”


	6. In Which She Helps a Jester Repair His Wagon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brina the Briinah is finally forced to leave Whiterun, and not on good terms. Big Brother Dovahkiin made enemies of the Thalmor, and that's a new problem for Brina to deal with now that she's alone on the road again. Hopefully she can find her brother before any more mess can be made, but for now she's going to try and make friends with clowns on the side of the road. He seems like a trustworthy fellow!

### Chapter Six

_24th of Sun’s Dawn  
I can’t describe it and do the scene justice, Brother. You, who have never been connected to a place so strongly, would not understand what it felt like to see my home in that state of chaos. And you, lacking my sensitivity and deep love for those around me, would not be able to wrap your head around my feelings of mourning._

_I lost so much that night. I lost family and friends. I lost the first life that had been my own, for once not entirely spent in your shadow or shaped completely by your influence over me. I could have married one of the men, become Arcadia’s partner, anything. It could have been mine. But once again, I was forced on the road after you._

_My leg hurts so badly from running, but Danica will never be able to heal it for me again. All I can do is pray to Mara that the love and happiness that found me in Whiterun might find me again as I follow you further into Skyrim._

Waiting for a full day can make a person weary. Standing still, just watching the hours pass in silence, my heart was pounding in my chest as if I were fighting for my life rather than rotting away in a dungeon. I’d been left with a troubling bit of news and a whole bunch of absolutely meaningless gibberish regarding the climate outside my little stone box. No matter how much time dragged on, however, I couldn’t seem to put the pieces together to make sense of what Arvid had told me last night. Anoriath, my dear friend, was dead. And I was serving the sentence for that, as well as for poisoning the mead in Honningbrew. In the days I’d been lying about on the cot in the corner of the cell, everyone in Whiterun had gone up in arms over my arrest and detainment. According to the Jarl’s disturbed son, it was all because some woman was controlling Commander Caius, making him “tug on strings” to make the city fall apart.

It all sounded perfectly ridiculous, no matter how I looked at it.

“Brina?” Arvid’s voice was an anxious whisper, barely containing his excitement. Through the bars, I could see that he had his helmet down under his arm so that I could witness his charming smile in all its glory.

“You’re back!” I cheered. “What is it? Has it finally calmed down out there?”

He kissed my forehead through the bars like he so loved to do, and I could smell soot on the Whiterun standard that he wore. “Not in the least! It’s going to be alright, though. The Stormcloaks are about to attack, and when they do, Whiterun will be put to rights. Caius will be out of the guard, and Imperial influence won’t compromise our freedom, or the safety of our citizens. The Thalmor have sent representatives to collect you and bring you to their embassy; that was the final nail in the coffin for any Imperial support this city had. The Stormcloaks march, and every son of Skyrim will put down his weapon and let them take the city.”

“Arvid! That’s insanity!” I was hushed by a firm, solemn look from my favorite guard.

“I know. The Thalmor are looking for you, and they’re not likely to stop. Once the Stormcloaks get here, you can sneak out without anyone seeing where you went. There won’t be anyone for the Thalmor to question, because you’ll have disappeared right in the heat of battle! There will be a carriage waiting for you outside the city. I’ve got it all planned out.”

Now I wasn’t just lost, I was borderline hysterical. “Carriage? To take me _where_?”

Arvid shrugged, as if the question were meaningless. “Wherever. Word is, you brother has been in both Winterhold and Windhelm recently. You can get back to searching for him. And once Whiterun is completely in Ulfric’s hands, you’ll be safe to return here. Everything will be best, though, when the Empire and Thalmor have been eradicated from Skyrim completely.”

To think, I’d once been eager to leave. Now, the very prospect of being alone, out in the wilderness again, made my stomach turn and my eyes sting. “This is all so unfair. Why didn’t you just let the Thalmor come and talk to me? I’m sure we could get it figured out.”

“Over my dead body. They weren’t looking for a neighborly chat, Brina. I swear to you, you will be safe if you just follow along. And when you get back, I’ll be waiting for you,” Arvid vowed. Reaching to the ring of keys on his belt, the tall Nord opened the lock to my cell but kept the iron door closed. “Just wait for now, in an hour it should be alright for you to leave. Just go right out the main door. No one will be around to stop you, and there will be a carriage outside the wall.” He turned to leave.

“Where are you going?!” I shrieked, surprising myself at the chorus of echoes that reminded me how desperate I sounded.

“I’ve got to go and pretend to prepare to fight,” he answered with a mischievous wink that was soon hidden away by his helmet. “Not that I will. I’ll be the first to give my loyalty to Ulfric and his men, as soon as they approach.”

“You can’t mean that! Don’t you Nords have some sense of pride that won’t let you surrender?!”

“It’s not surrender, Brina. It’s the right thing. Skyrim belongs to the Nords, not the Empire, not the elves who control the Empire. I knew Whiterun had to be taken by the Stormcloaks as soon as I heard that the spike-ears wanted you, and that Caius was gearing up to send you to them. We won’t answer to them, especially if it means that our lives and what we care about must be sacrificed to make way for their plots!”

Through the dryness of my mouth, no words could be formed. All I could do was watch helplessly as Arvid started away, out of sight of my little cell. With the door unlocked, it occurred to me that I could run after him. Maybe I would beg him to stay with me. Maybe I would plead for him to come as well, to get on that carriage with me. If I was going to go out looking for Brother again, why should I do it alone? By now, I was fairly certain that he loved me; he might have stayed with me. But my feet were frozen in place, and I couldn’t bear to follow after him. Following my brother all these years was hard enough on my heart.

He did afford me a final parting word as I heard the door out from the prison open. “When you come back to Whiterun, find me first. Before anyone else. I’ll be holding my breath until I see you again.”

It was sweet. Would have been sweeter if he weren’t on his way to betray the Empire and help the rebels conquer the city I called home, but admittedly, it was sweet.

The sound of that door closing echoed in the stone dungeon for the entire hour that I was told to wait. Patience is a hard thing to have when slowly the usual dungeon sounds are replaced by far-off screams and a closing-in roar of fire. Clattering steel rang as if the stone castle were a bell to bounce the sound around in its confines for eternity… But, as promised, the sounds never made it into the dungeon itself. No one was there, no one to stop me… I looked across the dungeon, to where there had once been another prisoner. Now, the cell was empty, though I didn’t recall them being freed.

Enough time had passed, I was certain, so I swung the cell door open and walked out for the first time in six days. Above, I could hear the sounds of battle. If Arvid had spoken truthfully, then the whole guard would have given up the fight—so who was still there to be fighting? Shouldn’t it have ended instantly? I made my way out from the main dungeon and up to the little office that would lead me back out of Dragonsreach. As promised, there wasn’t a soul in sight, even here. I was nearly at the door, reaching to push it open, when—

“In here!” I heard a commanding, cold female voice say.

It wasn’t a voice that I recognized, or that meant anything to me, but the coldness in the sound sent my feet tumbling backward to get away. Something instinctive commanded me to escape her, like the way rabbits bound into the brush when a wolf howls in the distance. I darted from the little office, back to the prison, and into the nearest cell that had the door open. It wasn’t my cell, but the iron door was so wide that I wouldn’t have to make a noise to open it enough for me to slip in. Besides that, I figured in the dimmer light, I might hide a bit better—the guards had always been very good about keeping my cell well-lit and warm, and that wouldn’t help me to hide.

I had no idea why I was hiding, of course. This person could have been anyone, and I had no reason to believe that she had ill intentions. Yet she hadn’t been part of Arvid’s plan, and something about her voice made my blood run cold, and a primal survival instinct screaming in the back of my head to flee for my life.

One corner in particular was dark as pitch, and I figured the blackened corner was all I would need to get out of sight of whoever was now tap-tap-tapping her way down the stone corridor.

Well, it was more than just a dark corner. I couldn’t even see where I was going when I toppled, head-first, down through the floor. How I managed to keep from screaming, I’ll never know; maybe the shock just stole the wind from my lungs before I could get a sound out. And, to keep me from hurting myself any further, I landed on a body. Yes. A body. It was as disgusting as it sounds. It looked like he hadn’t just died from the fall, but also a bad infection, probably from an infected skeever bite.

This time, I had to consciously hold my hands over my mouth to keep from crying out, and turn my eyes away so that I wouldn’t vomit. There simply wasn’t time to look at the poor soul, or investigate. If that woman was looking for me, it was only a matter of time before she discovered this hole as well. Adrenaline alone kept me focused and determined enough to stand and untangle myself from the puffy, swollen corpse and start running blindly through what I assumed to be a sewer system beneath the castle. The network of tunnels were barely lit by torches shining through grates in its ceiling, revealing the dungeon and barracks above.

I just ran without direction for what felt like an hour, and felt a sense of dread fill my chest at what I thought was a dead end. Barely visible, seeming to rot right into the stone behind it, I could barely make out a frail, old wooden ladder.

I had no options and, still absolutely convinced that that mystery woman was following me, I took my chances with the ladder, slamming against the trapdoor with my elbow and feeling a wave of must and dust fall down on me when the passage opened.

One of the barracks. Ever since the fight with the dragon and subsequent party, I had been invited by guards to share some mead and stories with them after their shifts. It wasn’t necessarily allowed for a civilian to be lollygagging in the barracks, but none of the officers ever told me to leave, and as far as I knew, Commander Caius never aware of my visits. Now I was thankful that I knew my way around the building, and that all of the guards were out fighting so that I could scramble out unseen.

Thankfully, I emerged from the back side of the Bannered Mare, where I was mostly alone and hidden. However, even from my sheltered position, I could see smoke billowing into the air and a few buildings crumble from fire or under the projectiles from catapults. _Why in Oblivion is there even a battle?_ I thought again. Had not as many guards turned their blades against Witerun as Arvid had thought? I had never been particularly sneaky, but there was enough chaos in the city that I was able to skulk along the wall without being noticed. But how the hell was I supposed to get out of the city? From where I could see, the main gate was obscured by a wall of smoke and flames.

The air was so heavy with soot and embers that each breath I drew was more pained than the last, and my mouth felt dry with a sickening flavor of char trapped in my nose. Keeping close to the stone walls of the city, I looked for any way I might get out undetected. A hole in the wall, anything! My prayers were answered by the ruins of one of the little lookout spots on the wall, which seemed to have been destroyed by a boulder flung by a catapult. The resulting wreckage included a much lower section of wall, and a mass of splintered wood that I was somewhat confident I could climb. I clammered clumsily over the kindling, pausing only when the sound of a scream froze me in place.

Glancing over my shoulder, I could see Arcadia’s Cauldron. It didn’t look like it was in any particular danger; no smoke billowing out from the windows, no clear damage to what I could see of the building. But if that was Arcadia screaming… By Oblivion, even if it _wasn’t_ Arcadia, how could I just turn away from the sound of someone screaming? How could I live with myself?

I was about to find out. Between buildings, rushing through the madness with plumes of magicka rising from her hands, I spotted a tall woman in long robes of black and gold, and I knew instantly that she was the one who had been in the dungeon before. She had to have been looking for me, I was now unreasonably positive. No matter how my conscience insisted that I turn around and try to help anyone and everyone I could, that adrenaline shot through me again and I was scaling the pieces of guard tower haphazardly, scratching myself and setting splinters into my skin with abandon. All that mattered was getting over the wall, I told myself.

The other side of the wall wasn’t nearly as easy to navigate, however. I was met by a straight drop, and if it weren’t for the wall being broken in this area, the fall would have snapped my legs. If there was anything I didn’t need any more of, it was broken legs.

I’ve heard it said that there used to be levitation magic, and that some Telvanni wizards still practice it, despite it having long since been outlawed. If I ever met a Telvanni wizard, I would make sure that he taught me the spell, legal or not. Heights and I had a long and bad history together, and I would like to end the rivalry once and for all.

Again, not many options stood before me, so I took a deep breath and tried to land with my knees soft, like I’d read in a book somewhere before. Feet first, body straight but loose… That was how the book described it, right? Midair, I succeeded only in terrifying myself with doubt until I hit the ground at last. It wouldn’t have hurt, I bet, if the earth below weren’t jagged with shattered rocks or crumbled mortar, and were at least level with itself, but for the most part, I was rather unscathed. For the most part.

Now I just had to find that carriage Arvid said he arranged for me. Everything in the direction of the stables was alight, and the noises of battle clanged loudly—I would guess, then, that there wouldn’t be a carriage waiting in the more predictable spots, unless the driver wanted to put his horse out. Maybe, then, the carriage was going to be along the other side of the wall, near Dragonsreach. Maybe they’d planned on me coming over the wall right by the dungeon—of course, that had to be it! So, I followed the wall all the way up to the north side.

And I saw nothing. No signs of a carriage, or horses, or people. The farms that I passed were quiet, and I wondered if the farmers were hiding silently inside, or if they had fled. Where was there to go to?

Maybe the carriage was just waiting at a safe distance… I could hear the rational voice in my head tell me that I was in denial, that clearly something was wrong and, in light of the current war going on right behind me, I couldn’t reasonably expect for there to be someone just standing around, waiting for me. But I couldn’t give in to that reality right then. I was too afraid and too heartbroken, and coming to terms with that might have been too much for me. Holding on to my denial was all that was keeping my feet moving despite the terrible pain shooting up my leg or the gut-wrenching fear.

There was no denying the truth, though, when I’d been running away from the glowing city for a full two hours. It was well past midnight, and the northern watchtower came into view under the gleam of Masser and Secunda. The old tower was vacant, presumably because every available guard had been forced to Whiterun’s defense.

No one in sight… still. My pace slowed to a morose drag of my feet. In place of adrenaline, I was left with heartache and exhaustion.

My brother just had to make enemies with the Thalmor, and the people of Whiterun assumed that my imprisonment was, in large part, because the Thalmor wanted me. Of course, there was also all the gossip about some weird influence of some woman speaking through a door, but maybe that was that Thalmor woman, and all the rumors were connected. As much as I wanted to get to the bottom of it, there was no point. I wasn’t going back to Whiterun any time soon, that much was clear.

All I could do was focus. I would find my brother, and he would make all of this madness stop. He would figure it out. It was all his fault, so it was the least he could do!

But where was I to go? I was out in the wilderness, alone, wearing the same dress I was arrested in and nothing else. Winter’s chill settled into my bones the slower I walked, but my strained leg was in searing pain after running so much for so long.

Just keep on walking, I had to remind myself. Just keep going and it will be okay. There was enough plant life that I could set on fire with my magic to keep warm, and I was bound to find food. Surviving in the wilds was nothing new to me; I’d just been very spoiled for the last several months.

The sky was beginning to brighten when I finally saw another farm. It was far enough from Whiterun that, I hoped, the occupants wouldn’t be hiding from the conflict and might be able to give me some assistance. The prospect of some kind of comfort hurried me along considerably.

I had to bite my tongue on the irony of seeing—lo and behold—a carriage in front of the farm. The closer I got, the more it appeared to be a cart more built for hauling heavy loads of freight than people.

“Hello?” I called out meekly as I approached. There was a horse harnessed and hitched and everything, which was unusual if someone was just going to leave it all night long. My weak left leg tripped up on something, and I looked down to see a wheel half-buried in the mud, several feet from the rest of the buggy. If this was my carriage, this would explain why it never got close to Whiterun to rescue me. “Is this the carriage Arvid told me about? Hello? Driver?” Someone had to be around—

I had only glanced over the brim of the cart to the other side briefly, yet when I looked back, two of the most startling eyes I had ever seen were staring at me just feet away. They were amber, reflecting the blood red of Secunda, and glowering into me with such intensity that I lost my breath for a moment. “Y-you… Are you…?” Deep breath, in and out! “Are you the driver who was supposed to find me outside of Whiterun?” I asked once my voice had returned to me.

The piercing amber eyes were sizing me up, flashing with assumptions and decisions and ideas. Even in the dark of night, I could see his mouth twitch, every single iota of emotion coming to life in his expression so that he was all at once the most open book of a person I had ever seen, and the most confusing and worryingly cryptic. I could see his face run a full gamut of responses to me, the whole spectrum from repulsion to elation. Nothing was hidden, which made me feel especially uncertain about each apparent thought he had of me. If he was happy to see me one moment, he was appalled by me the next.

This is, by the way, before I even noticed the ridiculous outfit he was wearing.

“I noticed your wagon is…”

“ _STUCK?!_ ” he finished for me. I jumped at his volume, pitch, and unadulterated fury that were all packed into the word.

“Right… Stuck… Is that why you never made it to Whiterun?”

If he seemed displeased by me at all before, now there was only hatred searing behind those shocking ochre eyes. I swore that I could see steam coming out his ears like some Dwarven contraption. “Whiterun? No, no, no, no, no, there’s no time for Whiterun! Mother has no business in Whiterun, so neither does Cicero!”

“Oh. Your mother…” Well, damn. I wasn’t getting a carriage after all, it would seem, right after hope had been restored. But as far as I could tell, there was no one out on the road expect for us, unless his mother was sneaking up on me like a sabrecat like her son had. “Has she gone to find help?”

“No, no, no,” the small Imperial said, each no a different pitch as if each were answering a different question. “She’s quite dead, you see. At rest, but too still. She’s the body. In the coffin. In the box. In the wagon. In the _mud_!!” His last word was shrieked, and despite myself, I jumped again. “I was going to take her to her to her new resting place, when this damn wagon wheel got stuck! Don’t you see?!”

“Stuck, and then snapped off of the axle,” I pointed out. My observation was met with a snarl, but I didn’t have the sense to keep my mouth shut. “It should be easy to fix. You brought tools with you, didn’t you?”

Suddenly swept up in a dramatic fit of melancholy, the jester in front of me whirled about, falling back theatrically on the side of the cart with a melodramatic hand at his forehead. “Alas, Cicero has no tools!”

Though the darkness made it hard to see, I went back to the wheel and observed it a bit closer. The spokes were mostly good, but one was loose, and threatening to fall off completely, and it seemed that the hub of the wheel was particularly dependent on it to remain fixed in place as it needed. Turning the wheel to look at it from the side, the whole thing looked a bit slanted, like the wood had been warped.

“I think I can still do something to help,” I offered. If nothing else, the distraction was keeping me from thinking of everything else that had transpired over the last several days, and for that I was thankful.

“Oh, yes! The kindly stranger can certainly help!” Cicero sang, popping up from his pose and prancing an excited little jig. I could barely keep up with this man and his moods! He pointed one soft glove up the path, to the farm that had been my initial destination. “Loreius, of the Loreius farm, has tools to fix poor Cicero’s wheel. But he won’t! He refuses!”

“It’s the middle of the night,” I said. “I doubt he would open his door for me, either.”

“I asked him at noon,” Cicero whined. “And again in the evening. And at dusk. And then, I knocked and knocked and knocked on their door when night fell, but they pretended to sleep. As if they could have slept through Cicero’s knock-knock-knocking! Damn them both! _Damn them!!_ ”

Patting my hands in the air like one would to calm a horse, I hissed, “It’s alright! Don’t get worked up! I know, it’s scary. You’re alone, in the dark, without anyone to help you or take care of you or comfort you, and you have the burden of burying your mother. Believe me, I understand how you feel completely. But getting upset won’t help. It’s never done a thing for me.” I had a lot of reason to be sobbing in the muck right now. It was all I wanted to do. But my own speech was inspiring enough to lift some of the weight from my chest and show Cicero just what I meant.

The turbulent and unpredictable whirlwind of emotions in Cicero’s eyes died suddenly. His face was blank, unreadable, and he certainly was sizing me up again, thinking very hard about me and what I said, but now I couldn’t even begin to see through him.

“Let’s just… wait until the sun comes up. I’ll stay with you tonight, and I’ll talk to Loreius in the morning,” I continued.

Moments ticked away as the jester looked me over, his head tilting back and eyes peering at me like a plate of food he didn’t recognize.

The silence made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. Just waiting for him to answer was no good, so I sputtered out even more words just to fill the space until he had something to say again. “You’ll get your mother to where she belongs. I promise, one way or another. I know how much this must mean to you; I buried both of my parents, by myself, and I know how painful this must be.” While it was strained, I did my best to smile at the tempestuous little man. “You must feel very alone. I do, too. More alone than I’ve felt in a long, long time.”

“All that matters is that Mother reaches her new home home,” he said finally through clenched teeth. “Sweet Cicero must do that for Mother.”

“I understand.” My smile widened, for his sake. “Family is the most important thing there is. I know exactly what you mean.”

Near the wagon, just a little up the hill, there was enough grass that I could sit without fear of getting mud all over my already dirty and sullied dress. I plopped down unceremoniously and stretched my throbbing legs out in front of me. What I said must have gotten through to him at least a little bit, because even though his face was still eerily unreadable, he sat down beside me.

“You must be well acquainted with death,” he said, “to think of it so calmly.” It would have been a somewhat reasonable statement, if it hadn’t been followed up by a peel of laughter.

“Well acquainted? I don’t like to think of it that way, but I suppose it’s becoming more and more true.” My eyes went up to the sky, but the stars were starting to flicker out with the approach of dawn. I held my breath just like Brother taught me to keep from sobbing.

“Hmm? Oh, the kindly stranger has such wild moodswings! One minute she’s chatting away, the other, she’s crying! She might just be… insane!” the jester teased.

Pot calling the kettle black! I drew a long, loud sniff through my nose. “I’m not crying!” I said with all the pride I could muster. “And you’re less stable than I am! If you cried, maybe you could get your feeling in order.”

If he was offended, he didn’t show it in the least. “Cicero shares his agony in other ways than crying.” Already creepy and cryptic, and again followed by a shrill bark of laughter.

“That’s not exactly what I meant.” Mourning makes people crazy sometimes, I reminded myself. He was going through a lot. Right after Mother and Father died, I had been an inconsolable mess, no matter how much I held back my tears.

Without my brain’s consent, my body fell back against the grass. The days spent in the prison had been harrowing, and all night spent running left me drained like I couldn’t remember ever being before. I was fading from consciousness when I heard my jester companion ask, “Say, do you… _hear_ something?”

“…No. Why?”

Cicero was silent, but his quiet was gradually broken by a chuckle that got louder and louder, until it turned into a hearty guffaw. “Cicero just wondered! Just—wanted to know!!”

He was still laughing when I fell asleep.

I was woken up by the sounds of Cicero’s knock-knock-knocking. I rubbed sand from my eyes to see my curious little friend leaning over the broken wheel, smacking it with a hammer.

With a hop to my feet, I scampered over to him. My backside was drenched in dew, while rocks clattered around in my boots with every step. Oh, what I would give for a clean dress and a pair of socks right now!

“Oh! Loreius gave you tools after all!” I exclaimed. “You’ve never held a hammer in your life, by the looks of it. Here, give it to me.” Granted, I had never used any tools like these until I spent time living with Alvod in Riverwood, and even then I was useless. But I was at least a little confident that I could get his wagon moving again. “Give me that. Was Loreius willing to help, too?”

“Help?” Cicero asked, brows lifting. “Oh… Oh, no! No, he won’t be helping us! But Cicero has all the help he needs!” He threw the hammer my way, and I managed to catch it while only hurting one of my fingers.

We spent the whole morning working like a couple of idiots. As it turned out, we were pretty equal in inexperience when it came to wagon repairs, so there was a lot of grumbling and trial and error. Time passed amazingly quick, though, with Cicero always humming a tune, or singing a song, or telling jokes. Some of the songs I even knew, and was able to sing along, much to his delight. It made it easy not to think about the smoldering ruins of Whiterun, or Anoriath’s death, or Arcadia’s unknown fate.

With Cicero, I was able to escape from that reality.

“Where are you going to?” I asked when the wheel was at least secured to its axel.

“Mother’s new home!” Cicero sang.

“But where is that?”

“With her children.”

“Like, your family home? Where is that? Cyrodiil?”

“It is where her children are.”

This wasn’t getting anywhere. “It’s just that I need to look for my brother. But he’s been really hard to find. I thought, depending on where you’re going, I could just stay with you for a little while. You’re alone, I’m alone. You’re burying your mother, I buried both my parents. You’re on your way to your siblings, I’m trying to track my sibling down. We’ve got a lot in common, and when you’re not scaring me out of my wits, we get on well. And, well, I’d like the company. After what happened to me last night, I might well _need_ the company.”

He seemed to mull the idea over. I could see all sorts of ideas fly through his mind, just like when we first met; his eyes flickered around, like he was following his thoughts across his vision. Every moment saw a minute shift in his smile or the angle of his brows, each little change conveying a very different, but no less passionate, emotion. But when he seemed to settle on one thought, one expression, it was a sardonic smirk accompanied by a slow shake of his head. “That arrangement would get… messy. You wouldn’t last long with sweet little Cicero.”

“I’m very patient!” I argued.

“Ooh-hoo-hoo-hoo! Not what Cicero meant! But that was funny! You are funny!” he hooted.

I puffed out my chest and looked away from him. He was practically a stranger, so there was no sense in getting too upset about the rejection. “Okay, fine. I can take a hint. Go ahead, then. I’ll give the tools back to Loreius.”

“Oh, don’t bother,” he laughed.

“No, I need to. I was going to ask him for some food, or clothes or… well, anything. All I have are the clothes I’m wearing.”

One hand caught to edge of the cart, and with hardly any effort, Cicero kicked up his feet so that he was in a one-handed handstand over the box that contained his mother. His free arm dug down, in between his mother and the wooden wall, and when he found what he was looking for he gracefully flipped off of the cart to land on his feet  with all the agile elegance of a true acrobat. “Loreius won’t be any help to you now. But here, thoughtful Cicero already got food and a cloak from him!”

“Thank you!” I exclaimed, eagerly taking the generous gifts. As soon as his words sunk in, though, I added, “Wait, what? What does that mean?”

However, Cicero was on his buggy before I could stop him, laughing at the top of his lungs and getting further as he rode toward the still-rising smoke of Whiterun to the south. He never answered, and for the rest of my life, I will regret ever being curious enough to find out.


	7. In Which She Gets Caught in a Blizzard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Escaping the wreckage of Whiterun, and the horrible scene of the Loreius farm, Brina tries to escape to Windhelm.

### Chapter Seven

The food that had been taken from the Loreius farm lasted me a couple of days. Cicero made it hard to be thankful, though, since I had investigated his odd claims and discovered the cooling bodies of the farmers. Every bite was bitter, and reminded me of the husband and wife, cut into ribbons right in their own beds. No matter how much I feared starvation and exposure, I just didn’t have it in me to take any of the crops from their farm or supplies from the house. Even the linen cloak over my shoulders, given to me by the farmers’ own murderer, weighed heavily on me and offered little comfort.

Trudging through the snow, my only relief came in the form of clouds that so obscured the horizon that I didn’t have to watch the smoldering of Whiterun behind me.

Would the Thalmor know I survived? Or would they assume that I had been killed in the battle? Would they keep looking for me? I have spent nearly five years following my brother; it was an incredibly strange sensation to feel that I was being followed myself. Behind every tree, I swore I could see a flicker of a black overcoat. The glow of sunset on the snow looked like a golden Altmer’s face watching me.

This was what it was like to fear for my life. It had only ever been the elements or lack of food that had threatened me, never a living person. Sure, a few brushes with thieves happened over the years, but none of those experiences haunted me so.

In fact, I wondered what became of the bandit I first met in Skyrim. He had mentioned that he was new to his band, and that the one he ran with just before was particularly cruel. Had things worked out for him? Did he fit in? Did he save any other lives in the six months since I’d met him?

What about Arcadia? Was she alive and well? Was the Cauldron safe from those horrible fires?

And how was Elrindir? I wished I could be there to mourn Anoriath with him, and to comfort him. Butwho knew if he lost the Huntsman as well. His life must seem like it’s crumbling, between the death of his brother and the turmoil in his city. My ego liked to think that my disappearance would trouble him as well. Not that I wanted him to suffer any more than he must have been already, I just hoped that he cared about me as much as I cared about him.

And my guards… They were all like family to me. Fighting the dragon made me accepted by them, and since then they were dear friends. The barracks I had once drank and joked with them in before and after their shifts must now be quiet, cold, and empty. How many were left standing? How many guards survived to occupy them? Was Arvid, sweet, stupid, treasonous Arvid still alive?

Each step was a little slower and more difficult than the last. I wasn’t even sure just where I was going, I just knew that as long as I stuck to the roads, I wouldn’t be in as much danger of getting lost in the whiteout blizzard that was rolling over the mountains. Clinging Loreius’s wife’s lovely midnight-blue cloak just a little closer to my skin and cursing the wetness that was seeping through my boots, I knew I had to stop at some point to rest. I wasn’t in any particular pain, save for the ache in my perpetually strained left leg, but I would need to start treating myself for frostbite just to be safe. I didn’t feel any joint pain or confusion, or other early symptoms of hypothermia, but I wasn’t in any mood to tempt fate.

An outcropping of rock up the road looked just perfect for camping out. I hurried my pace, still hissing obscenities under my breath at Skyrim and its climate, and sighed with thankfulness that it was free of any snow in the narrow bit of shelter. A few bits of snowberry brush and some bark I stripped from nearby trees would be just enough to get me warmed up. I could get more wood once my basic needs were met. My fire caught instantly with a press of magicka-laden hands against the kindling, and I gratefully removed my boots to dry out and put my feet to the flames. Instantly, I could feel my spirit lift just enough to keep going. The air around me warmed up, and my hair and snow-covered clothes began to dry. The rabbit fur that lined the collar and bottoms of the sleeves was much appreciated now more than ever. And to think, I had almost worn something less formal to that damn mead tasting! I was thankful for my choices now.

“Well, well, well! And here I was thinking only trolls could live out here!” a too-friendly voice said from just outside my immediate vision. People do love to sneak up, and this took the cake as far as people coming out of seemingly nowhere. What in Oblivion was he doing out here?

The man was a Nord, hardy enough to handle he cold, dressed in thick fur armor and a lush cape composed of several hides. His ruddy face, splotched red either from unfortunate complexion or the freezing temperatures, grinned at me wolfishly over my fire.

“Hello,” I said uncertainly. For all the questions I had for him, I couldn’t find it in me to ask any of them.

“Mind if I sit down? It’s a bit nippy out here.”

“No. I don’t mind.” Something was very wrong here, and I should have been able to figure out what. What proper, sane man would be just bumbling along? He was dressed for the cold, to be sure, but why? What was he doing out here? An iron sword hung on his hip. If he was any kind of hunter, he’d have a bow.

When he sat, the heady smell of sweat and a tinge of blood filled my little alcove. Up close, I could see blood on his armor, and a bit or damage where he must have gotten a nasty stab. In the chest. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he wasn’t the one who’d been wearing the sturdy cuirass when the attack had taken place. A shiver ran down my spine, and it wasn’t the snow’s fault.

“So, lost in the storm, I take it?” my guest asked gregariously. “Are you out here all alone?”

_Lie, lie, lie!_ my good sense told me. “Not lost,” I answered at first, which was true. I held my hand aloft and showed off a miniature pyre in my palm. “And only as alone as a mage ever gets with infinite power to keep her company!” A bluff if I’d ever told one. But I didn’t have to lie outright and get caught like an idiot, and the Nord man seemed considerably less comfortable in the small space with me now. Good, I wanted him second-guessing any malicious intentions he may have had.

But, for all my intimidating spell-touting, he still wasn’t deterred enough. He stayed put beside me, hand twitching closer to his sword. “I see. I wouldn’t be much of a gentleman if I didn’t offer to stay with you. Protect you through the night from wolves or ice wraiths.”

“I think I’ll be fine enough on my own,” I stated curtly.

“You’ve got to sleep sometime,” he reminded me. It sounded more like a threat than a friendly reminder, and for a very clear reason. But if he wanted to kill me, he would have tried by now. Which told me there must have been some hope in reasoning with him.

“You should leave before I add you to this fire.” The violent warning caught even me by surprise, but I kept my face stoic and cold, praying he couldn’t see through me. I’d never done anything to hurt a person, and certainly had never killed or maimed a man before. I just needed him to believe that I was perfectly willing to kill him mercilessly.

“Ho, ho! Just hold your horses, miss!” my guest was now very clearly uncomfortable, but holding his own. “See, I’m not alone! I’ve got two friends who’ll be here in a little while to help me pick through your possessions and, if you’re still alive when they get here, help me to restrain you until we can find a buyer. Those dark elves in the east wouldn’t be afraid of your magefire. But at least then you wouldn’t have to be dead, right? I think you should calm down and come along quietly before I have to lower your selling price by fucking up that pretty face of yours.”

It was hard to tell if he was bluffing. Were we just puffing out our chests at each other, trying to see which would back down first? Glancing into the whiteout beyond the outcropping was useless, since there was nothing to be seen but snowfall. I couldn’t tell if there were other bandits looming in the distance or not.

“Neither you or your friends could get close.” I couldn’t back down now. I stood slowly, stooping downward under the jut of rock, and let my fires come to life once more in my hands. My cloak and boots were still discarded, so I had to hope that I didn’t have to stumble out into the snow if battle did ensue. Luckily, I’d managed to keep the conversation going thus far. Whatever his actual plans were, he had use of me alive—he would have attacked on the spot, otherwise.

It happened so quickly, no scuffles with wolves could ever have prepared me for it. Apparently, my threats had reached the tipping point, and keeping me breathing was no longer any sort of priority to him. His sword swiped in a wide horizontal arc right from the scabbard, humming a dangerous tune through the air it cut through. I pressed close to the wall of the outcropping, shrieking in terror. With just a breath and a pull back of his arm to announce his next move, I was screaming and cringing against the wall in anticipation of his stab.

This was the end, I was positive. My left hand went up in feeble defense, and I felt the tip of his sword nick into me, and the tension in my whole body come alive and manifest at the tips of my fingers in the form of crackling tendrils of lightning. The electricity ran down the metallic length of the thief’s blade, and I got to watch from just inches away as my attacker shuddered and convulsed on the spot. My free hand went in as well, clasping the dull and notched edge of the blade to add its strength to the shock. My attacker staggered backward, his sword arm flying wide and leaving him open to attack.

It never occurred to me to draw my dagger. Just a few months ago, this amount of magical exertion would have left me drained and unable to continue casting, but I felt no signs of slowing just yet.

Where once there had been sparkling lightning, a swirl of fire now erupted. It wound around the Nord, catching the fur that clothed him up in foul-smelling smoke. He was a standing pyre for a few minutes, trying in vain to swing his arms and cut me down. One erratic swipe got me, though his arm was weak and there was very little force behind the strike. What hurt most was the searing burn that the red-hot iron left across my shoulder. I held both hands out and watched him fall back once more, landing in the snow just outside my small shelter.

The snow around his melted in a great plume of steam. I stood over him, waiting for him to stand up, waiting for him to come at me again. My mind raced with things I would say, demands that he stand down… But he didn’t budge.

“Oh… Oh, Mother Mara…!” I called warm healing energy to my fingertips and rushed haphazardly into the snow after my attacker. “Shit, shit, shit! I’m so sorry! I just wanted to stop you! I wasn’t going to kill you! You didn’t have to die!”

No amount of healing would help him. The life was already lost, and his body was a just a horrific mass of charred flesh, blood seeping from the cracks and into the melting snow.

Never before had I caused harm to another person. I never turned my magic against a man, and I most certainly had never killed before. Just killing wolves and aggressive wildlife made me sick to my stomach and remorseful. The scene before me, the grotesque remains of a man I had killed, albeit in self-defense, was the most horrific thing I could have imagined.

I couldn’t stay in my shelter. My boots and clothes had dried, and I didn’t have frostbite. It would be difficult to walk through the night with no rest, but I just couldn’t stand to stay, especially with that poor man right outside.

How had I let myself fight back with such fury? I could have just singed him a bit, gotten him to stop! Or, I could have taken a different approach to begin with, rather than boasting and intimidating him until he felt the need to fight! If I had just kept him talking, I could have convinced him. I could have done something. I should have.

I was praying to Mara as I fastened my boots back on and pulled my cloak over me. My eyes caught the satchel and pouches on the Nord’s belt, though, and despite the drop of my stomach, I knew that with no money, no supplies, and no food, that I was going to be in serious trouble. “By Mara, I am so, so sorry!” I whimpered, kneeling at my victim’s side to riffle through his possessions. A handful of Septims, maybe even enough to buy me a meal and a night at an inn; a small vial of what might have been snowberry extract, which would come in handy for that whole not-dying business; and a hunk of tough horker meat like what Elrindir sometimes sold at the Huntsman. It wasn’t much, but it was a lot more than I had. “Mara, Standarr, Divines, please forgive me!”

A hum in the air caught my attention a single moment before a shaft of wood shattered against the stone behind me.

Well, I may have been bluffing, but the dead Nord hadn’t been lying about having friends.

But the idea of fighting any more made me sick. I pocketed what I had stolen from the Nord and bolted, hurrying into the snowstorm along the vague outlines that were left of the road. Another arrow whistled by me, snagging into Loreius’s wife’s cloak and ripping a hole at the bottom.

I wracked my mind for a spell, something that could get me out of this. I mostly knew restoration and destruction school spells, but I remembered an illusion I’d been taught in Cyrodiil that might be just enough. It wasn’t as powerful as the invisibility spells that some mages in Skyrim knew, but with all the snowfall already obscuring me, I hoped that a bit of chameleon would make me fade into the blizzard.

Without any prior background in illusion, I could feel my magicka slip away all at once when I enacted the spell and became a translucent ghost of a person. Luckily, cries of confusion and frustration sounded off behind me, telling me that my little stunt had worked.

For yet another night, I ran and stumbled blindly along the road. When my magicka replenished, I held a little flame aloft in my hands to keep somewhat warm and to help light my way and keep to the road.

One of Cicero’s songs—one of the less insane, more pleasant ones—came to mind, and when I was sure that no one was still chasing me, I passed the time by singing it. Strange how the song of a crazed murderer could quiet my conscience about killing someone, and soothe my broken heart from losing my home.

“Marching west o’ Anvil,  
Sheo’s soldiers swore,  
What they’d do for a drink,  
And wouldn’t ya think,  
They’d be thirsty for seven days more~”

It sounded like nonsense, which I suppose was the point. There was no denying that Sheogorath and Cicero were well acquainted.

“Marching north o’ Dawnstar,  
Sheo’s soldiers swore,  
How hot it could get!  
That desert’d kill them yet!  
The heat would scald ‘em seven days more~”

The song went on, and I couldn’t remember the lyrics. I just knew Sheo’s soldiers liked to march right off of coastlines, and bitch about problems that may or may not have been legitimate. Someone needed to tell Sheogorath not to have an army. What kind of battle could he be interested in fighting in the first place?

Whatever the case was, it was an excellent distraction from all my inner turmoil. My journal, thankfully still tucked in the back of my belt, would no doubt bring all my pain to the forefront of my mind when I finally got the chance to write again. I needed to record everything that happened, so that when I saw Brother, I could show him everything I went through just to bring him home. Maybe then he would be moved to some kind of sympathy.

Just as the storm let up, and I was starting to worry about my toes again, a building emerged from the flurries of white. The sun was rising, but that didn’t stop me from renting a bed and buying as much warm food as I could afford with the money I had scavenged. Once I’d thawed myself properly, I asked the innkeeper to wake me by noon so that I could be on my way with plenty of daylight.

Removing my clothes to dry, I slept like the dead. Then, I was back in the snow.

By nightfall, I made it to a little mill, where I was able to pity the proprietors to sleep on a floor. I asked about Brother, about what gossip they had heard.

“He’s been up to the College of Winterhold,” said one grizzled worker.

“Aye, and he was in Windhelm a while back,” another piped in.

“Does anyone know where he is now?” I dared to ask.

“Ivarstead.”

“Falkreath.”

“Whiterun.”

“Windhelm.”

Well, one of those I could easily rule out. The other options didn’t leave me much, but at least the direction I was headed was on the list. I tried not to look too miserable when I growled, “I’ll go to sleep now. Thanks.”

I was on the road one more day when I saw the stone fortress of a city looming in the distance. It was dark and ominous against the white backdrop of the world, gloomy and unwelcoming. A bunch of soldiers wearing blue standards came around a bend, glancing my way and then dismissing me. The curling caricature of a bear set on that blue made my mouth taste like bile. These were the people who set Whiterun on fire. These were the people who destroyed my home!

I kept my distance. No matter how much I wanted to scream at them, attack them, what good could any of it do? They would kill me in ten seconds flat, and it wouldn’t bring that life I was starting to build for myself back.

Dusk fell when I made it to the gates. The bridge across the river was so high up that I felt myself swoon with nausea, no matter how I kept to the center and stared straight ahead. The idea of the whole thing crumbling under my feet replayed again and again. I’d been up in mountains before, and atop hills, but never before had I felt so vulnerable, like the slightest breeze could knock me right into the frigid waters below. I was all too thankful when I stumbled into the city, cold and wet, to be greeted by warm braziers burning and sturdy buildings puffing warm smoke from every chimney.

Before finding a place to stay, though, I had to find a temple. My soul felt dark and twisted, with all the horror of the last few days, and I needed to confess before a true shrine. To my surprise, the symbol at the alter was one I couldn’t recognize.

Kneeling down before the holy statue, I realized that I was staring blankly at it instead of showing any kind of piety.

“Why do you look so confused, girl?” a voice said behind me. Damn, but people just love to start conversations from behind!

I looked over my shoulder to the woman dressed in the goldenrod garb of priesthood. “I’ve never seen this figure before,” I confessed. There had been a lot of Dunmer when I first entered the city, so I asked bluntly, “Is this one of those Dunmeri Daedric temples?”

The bright side was, what I had said left the priestess too flabbergasted to slap me outright. The bad news was, she certainly looked like she wanted to. “What in Oblivion is the matter with you? This is a temple to Talos! He founded the Empire! He is the hero-god of mankind!”

“Talos?” Come to think of it, I had seen this figure, in passing. I rarely went up to the Wind District in Whiterun, but when I did, old Heimskr was usually ranting in front of a carved stone statue that looked quite similar. “I see… I didn’t know there were temples for him still. It’s illegal now, isn’t it?”

“You’ve never seen a temple to Talos?” the priestess said, aghast.

“No. I was born after the war ended, and by then all the shrines to Talos were taken down. I don’t think I’d ever heard his name with any frequency until coming to Skyrim.”

I hadn’t asked, but the priestess sat next to me and told me about Talos then. He was a man with the heart of a dragon, who united the peoples and built an empire. He didn’t like the jungles, so he changed the very face of Cyrodiil by will alone. He was a hero, and when he ascended to godhood, he became the protector of men.

A few hours into our discussion, it occurred to the priestess, who’d introduced herself as Jora, that I probably came to the temple for a reason.

“I just ran from Whiterun… It was attacked by Stormcloaks, and I have no idea if the people I love are still alive. I slept while a lunatic murdered two innocent people, and then wore the lady’s cape all the way here. And I killed a person. With my own hands, I ended a man’s life when he threatened to rob and kidnap me. I felt like I needed to pray.”

While she was less than pleased that I had shown any dissatisfaction with the Stormcloak regime, Jora prayed with me, chanting sweet songs to Talos and asking him to guide and protect me.

“That you killed someone who tried to do you harm was no sin,” Jora added, glancing away from the altar. “Talos was a warrior, and shall ever be a fair and just god. Find forgiveness within you, for Talos would have you defend yourself.”

It was heartwarming, and I had desperately needed to hear that. I missed Whiterun desperately, and worried for Elrindir, Arcadia, and my guards, but there was nothing I could do but look forward knowing that Talos was on my side. I would be haunted by the sight of the man I killed forever, but it was his life or mine, and he clearly wasn’t making much of his. I had to steel myself. Danica had told me, I was surprisingly Nord-like, and Elrindir had once said, “Skyrim has a way of making Nords out of everyone.” I needed to remember that, and embody that. It wasn’t just a heartening philosophy, it was how I was going to survive. I had to toughen up.

Well, the sentiment was easy enough when I’d been in the warm temple. But a minute later, when I was out in the cold with nowhere to sleep and no money for a room, I was feeling very much the Imperial damsel in distress. Squatting in an abandoned shack wouldn’t cut it this time, not in this freezing weather.

“—probably an Imperial spy!”

My ears perked right up when I heard shouting in the distance, the words very much hitting home. It sounded like a drunken accusation, but true or not, it got my interest.

Two Nords surrounded a pretty Dunmer lady, all berating her. She managed to look perfectly proud and confident, while defending herself with a level, honest voice.

My voice was a little less controlled and refined. “I know two good, respectable men wouldn’t be ganging up on a lady in the dead of night!” I growled once I’d made it to the scene. Maybe Jory’s talk about Talos supporting people defending themselves hit home. Maybe being argumentative was the easiest way I could become more Nord-like. Maybe the Dunmer lady was so pretty and exotic that it seemed too wrong to let this go on. Or maybe, and most likely, I hoped she really was an Imperial spy. Whatever the case really was, I wasn’t going to stand for this truly despicable scenario. “If it’s really as bad as it looks, I’m going to have to tell the guards that a couple of good, respectable men are dangling by their trousers over the bridge. How does that sound?”

I was bluffing, if only in the fact that I couldn’t have stood to get so close to the edge of the bridge to hang them there. But the point still stood, and apparently my bluffs worked better on these men than they had on the thief who’d attacked me the other day. One grumbled something about having ways of finding out, and the other skulked away after spitting at the Dark Elf’s feet.

“Thank you,” the Dunmer woman said. She had the most amazing, vivid red eyes. If these men hated her for anything, it must have been because she was more beautiful than their own wives. “But I daresay, you’ve come to the wrong city. Windhelm's a haven of prejudice and narrow thinking, unworthy of one such as you.”

“I’m flattered, really.” I was, to the point of being flustered. Her eyes were mesmerizing. I’d seen a few Dunmer, including the one from the Companions, but I’d never really looked so closely at one before now. Her face was so narrow and delicate, somehow avian. “But I won’t be leaving anytime very soon. I’m looking for someone, and if he’s not here, I don’t exactly have the money to leave just yet.”

“Then be warned, anyone who’s not a Nord is fair game for bullying.” She turned to leave, but stopped abruptly when I hadn’t moved. “Aren’t you going? You’re not just going to stand there, are you?”

“I, ah, don’t really have anywhere to stay,” I admitted. “I don’t have any money to stay at an inn. In fact, I was just going to find a place to curl up for the night…”

Her face turned indignant, which I would later learn is actually the default state of a Dunmer face. “No. consider this my thanks for you coming to my defense. I’ll have Ambarys at the New Gnesis Cornerclub take you in for the night. By the way, my name is Suvaris.”

“Really?” It didn’t sound glamorous, but it sounded a lot more comfortable than curling up behind some barrels. “Thank you so much!”

“Didn’t you hear about the Shatter-Shield girl? Or Susanna the Wicked? Women just can’t be out alone after dark.”

“Why not? What happened?”

“There’s a serial killer about. He’s killed at least six women now,” Suvaris said.

“Oh.” A chill ran down my spine, and I glanced over my shoulder nervously at the prospect of someone lurking behind me. Even as she led me down into the Grey Quarter, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched.


	8. In Which She Falls Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After finally making it to the Snowy City after her heartbreaking experiences in Whiterun and on the road, Brina is afforded little time to heal before making the acquaintance of one of the most famous citizens of Windhelm.

### Chapter Eight

_28th of Sun's Dawn_  
 _Dear Big Brother,_  
  
 _When I was a little girl, I dreamt of the house I would live in when I got married, undoubtedly to some dashing prince. It would be a castle, with lots of windows that all had glass—real glass, not just rickety shutters in the holes in the walls of our family farmhouse. And on every windowsill, there would be pots of Timsa-Come-By and golden sedge flowers. It would be a beautiful estate, with a garden that only had beautiful things, not the dirty vegetables that we toiled over year after year. The roof wouldn’t leak in the rainy season, and the floor would have fresh, floral thrush that wasn’t infested with mice and bugs._  
  
 _I never thought we had it very bad off in our little farm in our little village in the shadow of Kvatch. But I knew life could be so much better._  
  
 _When Mother and Father died, so too did my lofty dreams about living happily ever after in my pretty castle covered in flowers. And it was a good thing, too, because my reality would get so much worse than that leaky, mice-filled cottage. I would sleep in the darkest, dankest of swamps. I would hide from the rain under the cracked statues of abandoned Daedric shrines. I would climb trees in the Great Forest to keep from getting eaten by bears at night. None of it would really prepare me for Skyrim, though. This place is the coldest, most inhospitable place in Tamriel. I’d take the Ashlands and volcanos of Morrowind, or the deserts of Hammerfell any day. I’d trade this cold for nearly anything._  
  
 _There are others who know my pain. People who dreamt of making new homes, beautiful homes, whose realities have been cold and dilapidated buildings, windows with no glass. They know me so well._  
  
 _Windhelm is not, and never will be, a home to me. It will never be the home of these Dunmer, either, not really. But right now, it’s where we are. And we’re here together, and that’s even better than Timsa-Come-By._

  
The whole room was drunk, myself included. And damn, it was a good night to be in the Grey Quarter.  
  
“Rolff Stone-fist!” Revyn Sadri hissed into his drink. “He never has anything better to do…”  
  
“The one and only! The vision of Nordic beauty and intellect, the pride of their race!” Aval Atheron jeered. He held up his tankard in mock-salute. “An inspiration to all of us lowly Elves!” Several other Dark Elves lifted their tankards as well, chortling some shockingly rude additions to the Aval’s cheer.  
  
“He’s even named for the extent of his wisdom!” Malthyr laughed. “Stone-fist. A rock and a fist. Poetic, really.”  
  
Faryl Atheron, with his heels cross atop a table, rolled his eyes. “Watch what you say. A better attitude might do wonders for lessening the tension between the Nords and Dunmer.”  
  
“Oh, I’m sure the tension would go right away if we all just bent over for them,” Ambarys sneered. “To Oblivion with the lot of the sodding pigs…”  
  
“Oh, quit complaining and pour me another drink,” Niranye groaned, shaking her empty tin tankard in her dainty golden hand.  
  
Apparently, the entire Grey Quarter gathered in the New Gnisis Cornerclub in the evenings. Almost exclusively Dunmer, with a few other mostly-Mer races popping in every now and again, the atmosphere was entirely new to me, but fascinatingly welcoming. To be sure, these Dunmer were all about the most gossipy bitches I’d ever met, with enough sarcasm to curdle their ale, but between every snide remark was a gale of intoxicated laughter. There was no bard to entertain the tavern, but one wouldn’t have been heard over the chatter anyways. A bard wouldn’t have been half as amusing as the catty comments shooting from one side of the bar to the other.  
  
Suvaris had been wonderful enough to loan me a dress of hers, a coarsely woven shift weakly dyed a bog-green color that accentuated the pallid hue of my skin that was only made more conspicuous by the hazy lighting. Naturally, I didn’t fit in with the Dunmer as far as looks went, but a very brief telling of what landed me in Windhelm quickly earned me a fresh mug and a hunk of bread. That I was a staunch supporter of the Imperials, and my new home had been taken over by Stormcloaks, won me carefully veiled sympathy.  
  
“So, you’ve really just been wandering around, looking for that brother of yours?” Suvaris asked me. She sat to my left, Niranye to my right. Both ladies were politely interested in me, but a few other eyes glanced our way at the question. The cornerclub got quieter than it had been all night.  
  
“I have. For almost five years now.”  
  
Niranye choked on her new tankard, and I watched a few grey faces shift to various shades in a spectrum of disapproval.  
  
“I can’t tell if you’re adorable as a kitten, or dumber than a stone,” Ambarys said.  
  
“Cheers!” Aval cried out, lifting his tankard again. “To Brina Stone-Cat! She’s drinking mazte over mead, and that’s good enough for me!” A cheer rose, and I flushed with the realization that the name would stick.  
  
“Be warned, they’re not nearly so personable or cheerful when sober,” Niranye whispered behind the back of her hand.  
  
“He just called me stupid, and the whole bar cheered,” I pointed out with bemusement. “Personable  _how_?”  
  
“I know what I said,” the Altmer shopkeeper said, waving my observation away. “Sober, and it would have been met with solemn agreement. At least now they’re in exceptionally good spirits about it. And a Dark Elf in good spirits is a thing to be treasured. Let alone a room full of them.” She paused. “And they cheered for the last part. You are leaving a good impression, I promise you. For a non-Dunmer.”  
  
And that was good enough for me.  
  
“Besides, if you think this lot is antagonistic, don’t ever walk into an Altmer establishment,” Niranye continued.  
  
“I think this is about perfect for me,” I said, taking another sip of the imported drink. With the Northern Maiden making more and more trips to Solstheim, the Dunmer were pleased to get more traditional flavors in the Grey Quarter. It was an acquired taste, but I was determined to acquire it.  
  
Eventually, I was led upstairs to a bedroll where I could sleep for the night. On a shelf in the upper rooms, I caught sight of red standards and metallic bits. They may not be Imperial spies, I thought, but they were something else at least as good. It made me feel ever better about getting to stay with them for the night.  
  
Clean, full, and happy, I fell asleep feeling like I was in a down bed rather than on the broken floor.

  
 _Big Brother,_  
 _My first impressions of Windhelm are reinforced with every turn. There are a few Imperials, but mostly it’s just the elves who show me any amount of kindness. The local alchemist yells at me if I spend too long in his store, even if I’m making potions and selling them into his stock._  
  
 _It is always cold, and always snowing. Not even the fire burns as hot as it should. And naturally, you are nowhere to be seen. I should have known. But, unlike I did in Whiterun, I do not expect to hang around in case you decide to return. As soon as I’ve saved enough money, I’m going to pay for a carriage and get out of this Divines-forsaken place._

  
Niranye wasn’t kidding about the Dark Elves being less friendly when sober. I didn’t feel unwanted, necessarily, but they were far more reserved and aloof. They barely afforded me any conversation, their statements short and curt, always right to the point. It was a stark difference from the night before, but I wasn’t made to feel any less welcome.  
  
I was told, to my surprise, that I was welcome to stay in the little storage space upstairs in the cornerclub for a time, as long as I didn’t make a mess and kept my nose out of anything that wasn’t mine. It was a fair agreement, and I thanked Ambarys profusely for it.  
  
But outside the slums of the Grey Quarter, I felt considerably less accepted. The blue tabards worn by the guards tightened my lungs, and the Nords glanced at me with derision. In the market, I heard the blacksmith’s apprentice gush over Ulfric Stormcloak for the whole hour that I was near. I managed to make a few coins from some potions I cooked up with local ingredients found here and there, but it was dismally short of the fee for a carriage. I would eat sparingly until I could save enough, I decided. I would badger the townsfolk for news about my brother, and get out as soon as I could.  
  
I had been stopping anyone who wouldn’t shove past and ignore me, asking about the Dragonborn until the sun set and the market became quiet and still. It was disheartening, but I had to remind myself that it wouldn’t be long before I escaped this damned city altogether.  
  
Before heading back to the cornerclub, I meandered through the residential area of town. Across the way from the vacant house, near to the Cruel-Sea estate, there was a poor excuse for a garden. Though weeds had overtaken the little patch of land, they offered exceptional alchemical possibilities, and would expedite my way out of this horrible city. Over the ledge into the street, hanging moss grew in perfect tendrils. Already, I was putting together my recipes. A bit of wheat, and I had an invigorating elixir. Just a few extra ingredients from the White Phial, and I would make back the money spent on them and more. Depending on how much I could yield from these, I might make enough to—  
  
The train of thought was cut violently short by a searing pain down my back that filled my vision with white. I managed to scream, could just hear an alarmed answer in the distance, before my body went slack and the world around me went dark.  
  
I suppose I had been meant to die.   
  
I awoke to the burning agony of my wounds, delirious and confused in darkness. It took all the focus I could muster to bring healing energy to life in my hands and direct the restorative magicka through my body, particularly to what had been damaged. Nothing made sense, and I was only vaguely aware that I was indoors. The temple of Kynareth, I thought, back in Whiterun. Everything had just been a terrible, horrible nightmare, and I’d gone and fallen off of some other high place and hurt myself again, my brain rationalized.  
  
At least Cicero had prepared me for a sight like this. Of course, going into the Loreius farm had resulted in me vomiting in their garden, but I was slightly more ready for this sort of sight.  
  
Candles still burned, illuminating carefully sorted piles of different body parts. Red bones were compiled into a vaguely human shape on a table beside an incomplete patchwork of skin. Muscles and connective tissue were piled together, and various organs were set in jars or on shelves. Other bones were scattered carelessly on the floor, and in the corner sat two buckets full of dark red liquid.  
  
And then there was me, sprawled carelessly on the floor beside those buckets, stripped naked. With a jagged breath, I forced myself to my feet, ignoring the lingering pain in my back. I had to get out, and quickly, before whatever monster had done this came back, and my bones joined that abomination on the table. I didn’t even think of my nakedness, but the sight of a little leather journal on the table instantly grabbed my attention. I snatched it and held it to my chest, thanking the Eight and Talos that my memoirs I’d been writing for Brother hadn’t been lost.  
  
A broad wooden panel appeared to be the door, but there was no easy handle, and it fought against my pushes against it. Fire licked between my fingertips the moment the thought occurred to me to just burn through it, and a moment later I was bathing the wooden portal in flames. As soon as the door was adequately sizzling away, I realized that dark smoke was quickly filling the room. I gave the door just enough time to turn black and begin crumbling before lifting a bucket of blood—damn, it was heavier than it looked!—and splashing it over the flames. They hissed in protest before darkness once again filled the room, and I stood there, flecked with red and staring at a burned and blood-soaked portal. Now, with only a few firm knocks with the heel of my hand, I was able to tear down what was left of the door.  
  
Once I’d successfully broken out of the room, I was running across a dust-covered floor, kicking empty bottles of mead across the floor in a dash for the heavy wooden door that promised escape.  
  
My luck is, if nothing else, consistent.  
  
The door swung open when I came just a few strides from it. I at least had the grace not to scream, if only because I couldn’t find the breath.  
  
We spent a few moments, staring at one another with equal shock. As soon as he stepped forward, however, I wheeled about and sprinted away, quick as a startled rabbit. I didn’t know where to go, or how to get away from him, but it was easy enough to tell that he wasn’t there to rescue me. Up the stairs, through another room full of stale air and skeever dung, I was quickly realizing that there may not have been a way to escape save for running past him back to the door. His footfalls right behind me, echoing menacingly through the whole house, told me not to even try getting around him, though, especially now that he had the tactical advantage of using those stairs as a chokepoint.  
  
There was nothing to do but keep running and hoping there was some other was out. A balcony, anything!  
  
It looked like a bedroom. There was even a rotting bedframe set against a wall, and a frightened family of skeevers staring at me when I barreled in. I was officially trapped.  
  
“My apologies. I thought I’d killed you. I really didn’t mean for this to have to be any longer, or more painful or frightening than absolutely necessary for you. I’m not a bad person, you see. But your sacrifice will make this world an infinitely brighter, more beautiful place. Please,” the man held one hand out to the side like a merciful image of Mara while his other hand brandished a short, curved bade, “hold still and I promise to make this quick. You won’t feel a thing.”  
  
 _One day, I want to meet a Telvanni wizard_ , I thought. Heights and I just have a bad relationship, and if a Telvanni wizard still knew the forbidden magic of levitation, oh, my life would just get infinitely easier. Moments like this one would play out so very different.  
  
The warped glass of the lead-laden window was caked with dust; it would make for a sad final image if this was really the end. I ran into the window, holding the leather journal up to protect my head, and felt it shatter around me before the world fell away and I was carried by Kyne.  
  
For a split moment, I felt absolutely safe. The air was frigid, bitingly cold, but I felt lifted from gravity, like the wind itself was cradling me. Broken glass whirled around me with the flakes of falling snow, reflecting Secunda’s glow by the hundreds.  
  
Legs soft, knees slightly bent, body upright—falling two stories onto glass-covered stone with no shoes is just as painful as it sounds, and I couldn’t recommend it to anyone.  
  
The sound of the breaking window and my subsequent wails of pain didn’t go unnoticed. In the time it took my attacker to run through the bedroom, down the stairs, and across the house, two guards surrounded me and hollered for others.  
  
“In the house!” I shrieked. “He’s still in the house!”  
  
One of the guards knelt by my side. He removed his helmet so that he could pull his tabard over his head, and quickly slid it over my shoulders. In moments, I saw half a dozen guards stampede from the direction of the castle and follow one another into the abandoned mansion. The sounds of shouts and cries of pain echoed—he was putting up a serious fight.  
  
At last, I watched a middle aged Imperial man get dragged out of the house by a score of guards. I was thankful, then, that I had run away. He was alive to face the justice and shame that he deserved. There was contempt in the eyes of every guard and townsperson who had gathered to watch, and while the man’s face only reflected righteousness, their judgment would be passed.  
  
I prayed to Stendarr under my breath that the proper justice would be dealt. He should not be allowed to die quickly or easily before answering for his sins.  
  
The guards had let me keep the tabard, not that I wanted anything but to burn the Stormcloak paraphernalia, and deposited me, still freezing, without shoes or any other clothing, in the grey quarter where I had told them I was staying. I stumbled into the New Gnisis Cornerclub just like that, shaking and with teeth chattering, while everyone had been busy drinking and calling each other s’wits and other less polite things.  
  
One person saw me, and went quiet. Then another, and another, and after just a few seconds, everyone was silent, staring at me.  
  
“What in Oblivion happened to you?” Revyn Sadri asked at last, breaking the horribly embarrassing silence.  
  
“Oh, leave the girl alone!” Suvaris hissed venomously, shoving her way through the crowd to stand in front of me. “Come along, let’s get you dressed.”  
  
“Oh, no,” Ambarys said, appearing beside her to keep her away from me. “Around here, we don’t ignore what’s happened to our own. If someone’s hurt her—“  
  
“What?” Faryl said, coming to his sister’s defense. “What will you do? Complain and bicker about how ill the Nords treat everyone else? As far as you’ve been concerned, we’ve been mistreated and abused for years, and you haven’t done shit about it yet! Now, get back behind your bar. Let her at least get some clothes! If she wants to talk, she will when she’s decent.”  
  
It was written on every long grey face in the bar: they were concerned, enraged, and curious, but none were going to go against Faryl’s sound words, or Suvaris’s absolutely blood-chilling glare. I was whisked away, through the snow of the Grey Quarter, back to the Atheron home.  
  
“I’ll pay you back for the other dress,” I promised, still trembling. Since none of the Atheron children had been home, the whole building was freezing. The holes in the ceilings and walls letting in wind and snow certainly didn’t help.  
  
“I’m not worried about that. None of the dresses I loaned to you were very much my favorites,” she answered, handing me another plain gown. This one was, at least for my skin, a much more flattering shade of faded rose. “You must have had quite the night…” She wanted to be gentle, but like the others, she was curious and worried. I couldn’t blame her in the least.  
  
“That serial killer you were talking about introduced himself to me,” I answered, stripping out of the guard’s blue tunic. “I woke up in some sort of arcane laboratory. Looked like one of those lich things that the old stories talked about. I ran away from him, jumped out the second-story window, and the guards went in and captured him.”  
  
Suvaris’s fiery scarlet eyes were locked on me with such intensity that I felt myself shrink. “The Butcher? He kidnapped you?”  
  
“It was probably meant to just be murder. He was surprised that I was still alive.”  
  
“How did you survive?” she gaped. “How did you get away?”  
  
I shrugged modestly. “I healed myself when I woke up. I think he stabbed me in the back, or something. I healed myself when I jumped out the window, also. And, ah, to get out of the laboratory, I burned the door down.”  
  
She was shaking her head in disbelief. “If you’re such a mage, why didn’t you just blow the bastard up?”  
  
Valid point, I thought, shrugging again. I could have. I had frozen a dragon solid, and killed a man with fire and electricity. I could have killed him. Instead I ran. I’d even decided to harden myself, to be more Nord-like and strong, and fleeing by no means was reflective of that. “It didn’t occur to me. For one thing, I was so afraid and confused that all I could think to do was run. And also, to be honest, hurting people just doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m not a killer, or a fighter. It takes a stressful situation, and one when I can weigh my options and be prepared to use force. Otherwise, I guess I just… don’t think to use violence.”  
  
Again, I saw that dumbfounded expression on the lovely Dunmer lady’s face. “You really are stupid and adorable. Ambarys was right. Brina Stone-Cat indeed.” She sobered after a minute, and set a hand on my cheek. “Are you alright?”  
  
“Surprisingly, yes,” I said. “I almost threw up when I saw the mess in that house, but… frankly, I think I’ve seen worse.” Cicero’s handiwork. “And I’m alive, mostly unscathed, save for a few aches and pains I’m just not a good enough healer to fix. A mug of mazte sounds exquisite, though.”  
  
After she handed me a pair of worn leather slippers, we went back to the Cornerclub where, the instant the door opened, every gleaming red eye was locked on me expectantly. Suvaris, confident that I was stable and emotionally sound enough to handle the crowd knowing the truth of the evening (not that I wasn’t fairly sure that the gossip would have gotten to them eventually anyway), called out, “The girl who got the Butcher in irons had better get a round or two!”  
  
They were obliged to give me a round or two, and more. Much more.  
  
Before long, I was passing out insults and calling names I didn’t know the meanings to with the best of them—of course, my remarks were always quickly followed by apologies and “I don’t really mean that”s, much to the combined frustration and amusement of my Dunmer hosts.  
  
On many occasions, I asked for translations of the words they were throwing about, and was often told they were simply “insults,” probably with no comparable translation.  
  
“So, what is a n’wah?” I asked after by fourth mazte.  
  
“It’s what you are,” someone sneered with a smirk.  
  
“Oh, then I assume it must be the only complimentary word in the Dunmer tongue!” I declared. I kissed Suvaris’s hand like a Breton courtesan and said, “You, my lady, are the most lovely, delightful n’wah I have ever met!”  
  
“Not how you would want to use that word,” Belyn Hlaalu told me helpfully. “And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”  
  
“Alright, alright,” I said. “What about nchow?”  
  
“That is how to interrupt someone, especially if you want to make sure they’re especially offended by it,” Aval answered. “It’s rather vulgar.”  
  
I nodded like a good student. “The Dunmer language is rather mean, don’t you—“  
  
“Nchow! Someone tell the n’wah to shut up so I can drink in peace!”  
  
In the morning, they would all be back to their surly, silent selves. They would be guarded, and mirthless, and stubborn. These nights in the cornerclub, when everyone got drunk to forget about their inhabitable homeland, or their downtrodden social status, or just the hard day that awaited them in the morning (or, in my case, the grisly murder scene that I had just barely escaped just hours before), they laughed and joked, insulting one another and the whole world outside indiscriminately.   
  
Hours later, I was watching the dark ceiling spin around from my little cot on the floor. Malthyr had carried me up, and carefully arranged a blanket around me. “You have got to be the luckiest, and least lucky, creature I have ever met,” he said. It sounded like he was scolding me, but I was fast discovering that that was how most things any Dunmer said tended to sound.  
  
“Imagine how I feel,” I purred into my flat pillow.  
  
Though I was drunk, I wanted to write this all down. The Dunmer, the Butcher, everything. With fumbling hands, I pulled by little leather journal from the pocket of the dress I still wore, flipped it open, and saw.  
  
The night was far from over. I would stumble across the city, break into that damn house again, find my journal hobble back to the cornerclub. I wouldn’t be back until noon the next day, still drunk and exhausted.  
  
I collapsed through the door, shocking both Ambarys and Malthyr, who hadn’t realized I’d left at all.  
  
But when I fell asleep in Malthyr’s arms the second time he carried me up to my bed, listening to him call me an idiot and a drunkard, I knew deep down that, if I wanted, I would have a family here in the Grey Quarter. In a way my brother never could, there were people in every city who could love and care about me, and I forgot why it was so important to find Brother at all.


	9. In Which She Meets Ama Nin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, Brina is out of Windhelm and experiencing some of the beauty that is Skyrim on a carriage ride to Riften. And when she's not having strange, dream-like conversations with mysterious, inhuman strangers, she's dealing with humanity, which is its own little slice of mayhem. Some new friends, some new problems, and, as usual, lots of bad luck for Brina.

### Chapter Nine

The carriage out of Windhelm couldn't have left soon enough.  
  
Three weeks spent in total in the seat of the Stormcloaks had not helped my attitude, or made me any more sympathetic to the Nords who lived there. On one occasion, I had glimpsed Ulfric Stormcloak himself meeting with the blacksmith near the market. It had made me sick to my stomach just to see him, and the next hour had been spent behind Niranye’s stall, sitting at her feet while I huffed and stewed over my memories of Whiterun in flames.  
  
When I wasn’t being harassed by xenophobic Nords, I was being entertained and cared for by almost-equally xenophobic Dark Elves. The Grey Quarter was a slum, but to me it was a haven. Every now and again, Nords would come through to shout at the Dunmer, and myself and various others would chase them out. Common enemies do amazing things for building friendships. I’d gotten the courage to ask about the Imperial uniforms and supplies hidden in the cornerclub, and while Ambarys had been very tight-lipped about the matter, he hinted strongly that it was no coincidence that his stock turned over whenever a ship or carriage left that would be going past an Imperial camp. I had thanked him with a kiss right on his lips, and was promptly swatted away with a grumble.  
  
But those three weeks had also given me plenty of time to put my ear to the ground regarding Brother. And the rumors were incredible. His involvement with the Thalmor had been a direct result of him having led an assault on their embassy and fort to the north-east. Why he would do it, I hadn’t the slightest clue. Also, more dragon attacks had happened all across Skyrim, and my Brother was actively hunting the beasts down to learn their language. It was incredible, the stories they told! Brother was going after the greatest dragon of them all, the son of Akatosh, or an aspect of Akatosh, or—something, the gossip was always different. It was Alduin, a legendary dragon that would eat the world. And Big Brother was going to kill him, and save all of Nirn.  
  
If I had been frustrated with him, or angry, that was gone when I’d heard that. Nearly-forgotten pride and adoration was sparked back to life, and I had spent that night raving to everyone in the cornerclub who would listen about how wonderful and strong and amazing Big Brother was!  
  
“I would think you’d be upset, since he let the Butcher just stay on the run,” Suvaris said. For a few moments, I couldn’t fish myself out of my mazte to formulate an answer. She noted my blank expression and continued, “He had been charged with investigating the murders. Didn’t you hear? He was looking into it, since the guards weren’t following through. And once he agreed to get to the bottom of it, what little involvement the guards had stopped. When Susanna was murdered, he started investigating and questioning people, until he was called away on some sort of business. That was the last time anyone saw him. He never came back.”  
  
Well, there went my swelling pride. “Wait—what kind of business? I mean, he’s trying to save the world, so—“  
  
“Word has it,” Aval cut in, “He went to find the White Phial for the local alchemist. But like she said, he still hasn’t been back.”  
  
“But he has a lot of important things to do!” I said defensively. “You can’t expect him to just drop everything to—“  
  
“If you think going to a wedding in Solitude is more important than the safety of every woman in Windhelm, or the final wish of a dying alchemist, or defeating a dragon that wants to destroy all Creation,” Belyn Hlaalu jeered, “then yes, he has  _very_  important things to do!”  
  
My face was red, so I cooled down with another drink. Since coming to Skyrim, I swear I’ve drank more than I have my whole life.  
  
  
_20th of First Seed,_  
_Big Brother,_  
_I don’t blame you. I really, really don’t. I am heartbroken that, for all of your potential and promise, you must be pulled in too many directions at once to do all of the things that the people and fate require of you. Please, Brother, remember what really matters. Prioritize. Know that the world is in your hands, and please do not take it for granted. I love you, Big Brother, and I will keep looking for you. But unlike the others, I will not deter or distract you from your noble cause. If I find you before you have defeated Aduin, then I shall allow you to remain in Skyrim until the deed is done. But when Alduin is dead, I will drag you to Kvatch if I must._  
  
_Likewise, I must focus. I must not dawdle and linger because I do not wish to interrupt you, or because I make friends along the way. I must never lose sight of my goal. Home, Brother. Or drafty, leaky-roofed home with the small plot of farmland filled with rocks. It’s still a far throw better than Windhelm._  
  
  
Only a few resident Dark Elves weren’t working or otherwise occupied when I left. They bid me short, impersonal farewells, and I gave them all hugs and pecks on their cheeks. But I saw the reflective sheen on their brilliant red eyes, and I saw the strain on their jaws, and left with a warmth in my chest for the time I spent in their hospitality.  
  
Though freezing cold, I was wrapped in Missus Loreius’s patched up cloak and Suvaris’s rose-colored dress. Anoriath’s rabbit hide wrapped around my neck, and I kept my hands tucked into the fur awkwardly for warmth. I had my small apothecary satchel on my hip, sporting a whole thirteen Septims for food and shelter upon arriving in Riften as well as a few snowberries that I was looking forward to experimenting on with some of the southern flora.  
  
A few others were in the cart with me. One enormous Nord man wearing full armor black as the dead of night took up one of the benches between his girth, large pack and massive axe. Sharing the bench along the other side of the cart with me was a Redguard woman peeking out from a dense fur mantle.  
  
“What business have you got in Riften?” she asked politely when the horse started trotting forward.  
  
“Bounty hunting,” the Nord explained, his voice echoing inside of his huge helm. “It’s a long way, but I’m after a man who’ll pay for the trip a dozen times over, dead or alive. Unless he pays up himself.”  
  
I cleared my throat. “I’m looking for the Dragonborn,” I said. “I wish he were so easy to track down.”  
  
My new bounty hunter friend went rigid. “You’re not looking for him because of the bounty, are you? You wouldn’t last a minute in battle with him!”  
  
In a whoosh, as though someone had hit me in the stomach, I felt all the wind get knocked out of me. “Bounty?” I choked. “You’re going after the Dovahkiin? He has the bounty?”  
  
“Of course!” he said. “I guess the word hasn’t gotten this far east yet, or the folk out here just don’t care, but the Emperor’s cousin was killed. On her wedding day! The Dragonborn was seen fleeing, and when they tried to detain him for questioning, he killed three guards and rushed out of the city.”  
  
Though I must have looked like an idiot, I just could not get my jaw to close. I sat there, gaping at him, as he listed off my brother’s crimes in Solitude. Several counts of assault, at least three murders, four if he was found guilty for the bride’s death, horse thievery, and more. “But he’s a hero!” I argued indignantly. “He’s a dragon-killer, and he’s on a quest to save us all!”  
  
“That doesn’t excuse him to be a menace,” the Redguard beside me said. As the sun rose, I could see more and more of a coppery tone to her skin, and I could imagine the desert sun reflecting on orange sands around her. She was gorgeous, but even more out of place in the frozen tundra than I was. “A person can have a grand destiny, but still be wicked.”  
  
“It’s not my job to judge a person’s character,” the Nord added. “I’m just going to collect the gold.”  
  
“Well, he’s not wicked, and you would be doing all of Skyrim—all of Tamriel a disservice by killing him! What is the bounty?”  
  
I wish I hadn’t asked.  
  
“Nearly five thousand gold. Funny thing is, he’s made himself a fortune from the old tombs and ruins he’s cleaned out. He could probably pay the bounty with ease. But since he hasn’t, he has to pay with his life.”  
  
This was the wrong cart to get on. This was bound to be one of the longest, most painful journeys of my life. “How could I convince you not to collect that bounty?” I asked in a quavering voice. I already knew the answer.

  
“Five thousand Septims,” he answered without missing a beat. He reclined against the side of the cart, and I thought how uncomfortable he must be, wearing that heavy, rigid armor all the time. Would he wear it the whole ride to Riften?  
  
“Okay… If I get you five thousand Septims,” I said, already feeling my stomach boil with bile and my skin go clammy, “will you please stop hunting my brother?”  
  
The Redguard woman at my side shifted uncomfortably, and the Nord across from me lifted his eyebrows. “Well, I just might be convinced, sure. But paying me won’t get rid of his bounty, and someone else is bound to go after him, too. You’d need to send five thousand to Solitude, too, to pay for his crimes.”  
  
Ten thousand Septims. And I had been struggling to pay for food and scrambling to collect fifty Septims for a carriage ride to the next town. I’d never even seen so much money in my life! I made the cart driver stop so that I could just out and vomit into a snowberry bush. I blamed the sujamma I had drunk last night, but absolutely no one was fooled. Many hours were silent, with the Redquard woman quietly reading or the bounty hunter running a whetstone across the blade of his axe, but I just stared over the side of the cart and into the distance.  
  
By nightfall, we’d reached the little mining settlement of Kynesgrove. The rocky little hill it sat on had a grim feeling, like a shadow hung over the whole place, making gravity especially heavy on its grounds. Stumps of trees had the look to them like graves, or arms reaching up for the sky that had been ruthlessly cut before what they’d been reaching for had been able to reach back. A little further away, uncut trees towered over the village, swaying in the breeze with a perfect sense of serenity and an indescribable feeling of purpose. The difference between the swaths of ground covered in cut trees and the brilliant skyline of majestic pines was phenomenally intense; just getting out of the cart and wandering from one side to the other seemed to be pulling my soul in different directions, up to the heavens and down to the dirt.  
  
I decided to spend my gold buying food, rather than a room. I could sleep in the cart if I had to. The lady behind the counter at the Braidwood Inn was more than happy to see her stale loaves of bread bought, along with a small hunk of cheese and a couple other bits. It would have to keep me until we got to Riften, since it was all I had. That, and I was thirteen gold further from my new goal of ten thousand Septims.  
  
I sat down by the hearth to munch away on the thick crust of bread while I tucked the rest of my food away into my satchel. By the warm glow of the fire, I began to formulate a plan for making that ridiculous sum of gold I would need to preserve my brother’s life and, hopefully, restore his reputation. If I could find him in Riften, then maybe I could just beg him to pay the sum himself—it was beyond me why he hadn’t already. Surely he was charismatic enough to stop the guards from cutting him down, and just talk to them peacefully!  
  
A woman, another traveler if my guess was correct, sat down at my side. She had no food, and didn’t look tired at all, but seemed to be here purely for the comfort and company. Looking into the flames, she smiled contentedly, and only then glanced my way. Her height and features identified her as a Breton, her red hair the color of the red tea that Arcadia had been so fond of, something about her made me want to give her a hug and cry on her shoulder. She reminded me of Mother.  
  
My heart wrenched, and I had to look away from her. I was in a terrible situation, needing more gold than I could fathom having my whole life, and the loneliness of being out of the road was hitting me like I hadn’t felt since first leaving Kvatch and the fresh graves of my parents. I missed my mother and father, and I missed Arcadia and Anoriath and Elrindir. I lamented that big Companion with his huge hands on my waist, dancing under the Gildergreen. My heart dropped to remember Dorthe, sweet Dorthe, from Riverwood. I promised her that I would see her again, and I had every intention of making good on that promise, but had no clue how or when I would ever return to that beautiful town in the shadow of skeletal ruins. And I worried for my brother. He’d been led astray in so many ways, and had so many dangerous enemies who all wanted him dead. Would I give up my life to save him? In a heartbeat, I decided. Without a second thought or an ounce of regret. I would for any of them. And just thinking of it broke my heart for the hundredth time since the night of the tasting at Honningbrew.  
  
So I did what I’ve done since I was a child: I stared up at the ceiling and futilely counted the thresh to keep tears from flowing, and held my breath so as not to sob.  
  
“Your heart is so full of love,” the Breton said, “just begging to overflow through your eyes. Why won’t you let it?”  
  
I was taken by surprise by the woman’s forwardness, her incredible intuition, and her remarkably gentle voice. “I’m sorry. What do you mean?” I asked, looking down from the ceiling and blinking away tears so that none would fall.  
  
“You look so afraid and alone. You look like you want to cry.” Her hand went over mine, melting the world from my sight. My heart felt warm, lifted, but my sorrow whispered from the back of my mind, determined not to be forgotten. “You may cry. There are those who would comfort you, gladly. They are all around you.”  
  
All around? I wanted to laugh. The Nord who wanted to kill my brother? The carriage driver who just wanted to get his gold and be on his way? I was as alone here as I would be in the middle of the frozen wastes.  
  
“I appreciate the sentiment. I really do,” I said. I pinched my eyes closed, determined not to cry. “You’re kind to say so. But I don’t think you really know my situation.” She looked like she was about to disagree, so I added, “I have many people who I love. They’re not with me now, and normally I would take comfort in remembering them—but for the moment, I’m too busy worrying about them. Thank you for your concern, but I know I’ll be just fine. One obstacle at a time, and I’ll be alright.”  
  
I was reminded, briefly, of the Breton man I’d met the night of the party, who I’d apparently done some deplorable things with, and the way the whole world reacted to his presence. This woman was similar, but far more subtle. The waves that her voice cut through the air were gentle, soft, and natural, where his had been noticeable and disconcerting.  
  
“So long as you know that you are loved,” she said, “you will find the strength to overcome whatever obstacles come your way.”  
  
“Being loved isn’t my inspiration,” I argued, though I’m not sure what inspired me to speak out so honestly, so plainly; the woman looked mildly surprised that I would contradict her. “The love that I have for others is. I don’t do anything for people to love me, I do things because I love them.”  
  
How this strange woman had opened my heart enough to start saying all of these profound and personal things, I might never know, but she looked satisfied with my answer. “That is admirable.” Her hand lifted from mine, and I could once again focus on the inn around us and the fire burning hot in front of us. “Your attitude would make for an exemplary priestess. You might consider the path.”  
  
I smiled, but shook my head. “I revere the Eight, but I have other responsibilities.”  
  
“Very well, then,” she relented with a growing smile. “But while you’re in Riften, do consider it. You cherish family and love, and would flourish in the Benevolence.” With a pat on my shoulder, each tap of her fingers sending a tremor of warmth through my body, she said, “And worry not for your loved ones. Your prayers for their safety have not been for nothing.”  
  
Where she had been sitting was silent and empty, and for a long few minutes, I wondered if I had slipped asleep and she’d left without my realizing. My stress must have been getting to me more severely than I thought. The conversation I’d just had made no reasonable sense—how could a stranger know any of that?—and I hadn’t even noticed her leaving. But, for what it was worth, what I remembered her saying about everyone being alright did bring me significant comfort.  
  
“The next town is more than a day away. You should sleep while you have the chance,” said a man sitting across the fire. Without his huge black helm and armor, I hadn’t recognized the Nord man. Without the armor, he was still intimidatingly large, but with none of the soft, cuddly promise that the Companion twins had had. His muscle looked like solid rock beneath his rough tunic and plain trousers. His hair was a light, soft brown that fell in straight little locks over ice-blue eyes. A Nord woman might have called him handsome, if not for the huge, angry red scar that ran the length of his face from one brow, across his nose, and down to his jaw. It must have been a grievous wound to have scarred so badly. He must have been nowhere near a healer when it happened. He noticed how transfixed I was by the red gash, and smiled a small, sardonic smirk. “Not used to seeing battle scars like these, eh? I bet the Imperial men you know are lily-white and only bleed from paper cuts, yeah?”  
  
“Sorry—I didn’t mean to stare,” I said hurriedly. What did I care if he was offended? He was out to kill my brother! “It’s just—I’m a healer. Well, not really, I’m an alchemist mostly, but I also heal a bit. I once healed a score of guards in the heat of battle. They killed a dragon, you know, without a single casualty!” It was one of the proudest moments of my life, and I hadn’t spoken of it since Whiterun’s destruction. It felt good to smile at the memory again. “Anyways, I just thought, it looks like no one treated your wound when it happened. Didn’t you have any potions on hand? Or anything?”  
  
The Nord laughed loudly at my question, making me shrink back into the little bench. “Single-handedly killed a bunch of bandits who’d been terrorizing the road just outside of Dragon Bridge, but no one in the town knew a damn thing about fixing a wound properly. The ladies had sewing needles, though, so they sewed my face shut, and that was about the extent of it. Healed just fine on its own, though.”  
  
Arcadia’s words rung in my ears, and I wanted to repeat what I’d learned so badly: his wound could have festered or gone corrupt! Those needles needed to be properly sterilized! How much blood had he lost?! That he was still alive was miraculous, to say the least.  
  
The amazed face I wore was enough, though. “Ha, what? You don’t think a real warrior can handle a cut or two? Find yourself in enough battles and you’re bound to get a scar here and there.”  
  
“I wonder if I could heal it now, though,” I pondered. As his lips started to form the words,  _It’s already healed_ , I cut in, “I mean, I wonder if I could fix the scar.”  
  
“Why would I want that?” he asked, his smirk getting wider to become a full grin.  
  
“To woo the ladies?” I countered, only half joking.  
  
He broke into another hearty laugh. “The ladies love me and my scars as they are, but thanks for the offer.” His grin turned just a bit mischievous. “You didn’t rent a room, did you? I was just about to turn in, and it is a large enough bed for two.”  
  
My head was shaking before he finished. “With the man out to kill my brother? I’d better not.”  
  
“I don’t have to kill him,” he said.  
  
“I just need to pay you five thousand Septims,” I said. “And I intend to. I just need to get the money.”  
  
“Four thousand,” he corrected, which made me perk up just a bit. Until he finished, “…if you come to bed with me.”  
  
Before I could help it, or even consider his offer, my pride answered for me, “Five thousand it is.”  
  
If he was offended, he didn’t show it. He chuckled, eyes twinkling at me with a look that promised he hadn’t given up, and retired for the night.  
  
I stayed awake, staring into the dwindling flames into the morning when Alfarinn the carriage driver roused everyone and insisted we get on the road again. “We won’t stop again until Shor’s Stone,” he warned us, “and there aren’t any towns between here and there. So you’d better get anything you need now, or you’ll be going hungry.”  
  
The moment the carriage started moving, I pulled the cowl of Missus Loreius’s cloak down over my eyes and did my best to fall asleep. The Redguard woman, Janan, generously loaned me her shoulder to rest on, and patiently kept reading despite me. I woke to the glare of the sun and a foul sulfur smell. Despite myself, I could help but cry out in amazement at the scene around me: the cold snow had given way to clay soil that was bright with yellows and oranges, broken by wide pools of boiling aquamarine that released sighs of steaming breath into the air. In the distance, bulky masses of wild brown fur ambled across the landscape, led by impossibly tall men who walked with heavy, lumbering steps.  
  
Nothing compared to this. The blinding snow of the mountains, the waves of seagrass outside of Anvil, the endless trees of the Great Forest, the murky swamps of the Topal Bay, none of them were as astoundingly foreign to me as this. I gazed out at the passing landscape with fascination, soaking in and committing every vivid color to memory.  
  
A large lump up ahead, off the side of the road, caught my eye. My chronically weak stomach turned at the sight, but there was no denying that this just might be the answer to at least some of my troubles: a long, bluish-grey body of a giant, not yet decomposing. Much.  
  
Begging to borrow a spare dagger from the Nord bounty hunter Olev, I jumped from the still-moving cart and ran ahead so that I could get the grisly act done before the rest of my party made it to me. I was proudly stuffing ten large toes and a tangle of creep clusters into my overflowing satchel by the time I sat back down on the bench.  
  
Eventually, I had taken to walking outside of the cart for hours on end, snatching up ingredients as we went. I nearly stumbled into a volcanic pool chasing down some butterflies, and Olev had to jump from the cart to fight off a prowling sabre cat that I’d wandered near enough to make hungry, but soon I was holding a considerable collection of treasures. My hood came down to be used for a pocket for bunches of jazbay and dragon’s tongue, and, as we rode further south into the rocky hills, stalks of thistle and mountain flowers.  
  
Getting ten thousand Septims would be a challenge, but I was far from defeated. For my brother’s sake, I would make the necessary bounty and redeem him for his crimes. After all, I knew that, deep down, my brother was a good man. My entire life, he had been my inspiration and my own personal hero; his life was just complicated, that was all, and it all just had to be a grave misunderstanding.  
  
Olev never mocked me, not for my brother’s predicament or for the conversation we’d had last night. When night fell, Janan asked to spread out on the bench, and I felt only a tinge of trepidation to sit cozily on the side with the large Nord. He was so big that it was impossible not to touch him. Carrying on a conversation with Alfarinn about places traveled and horses and whatnot, Olev didn’t seem to notice me sinking deeper and deeper into his side as Oblivion grew darker above and the spots of Aetherius in the sky glimmered brighter. By midnight, I was nearly asleep against him when I felt one heavy arm come over my shoulders and across me, holding me with a surprising amount of modesty considering his earlier propositions.  
  
I woke to a forest of birch and the prancing of elk through the morning mist. Alfarinn informed us that we would make it into Shor’s Stone around noon, so I stretched and dug some food out of my satchel to snack the morning away.  
  
The birch trees and tangled shrubs were lovely in their own way. It couldn’t compare to the strangeness and beauty of the geothermal springs to the north, but it was calm and peaceful, enchanting with the constant sing of pine thrush.  
  
I moved back to Janan’s side, and Olev started putting his armor back on, claiming that he felt naked without it. He shot me a wink with that.  
  
It was a good thing, too. About half an hour after Olev had finished buckling on the last of his ebony armor, the horse drawing the carriage neighed and reared violently, jostling the cart and all of us inside it.  
  
“Everyone out! Out of the cart!” I heard a gruff, deep male voice say. Six men in all appeared around us, some aiming bows and others raising swords menacingly. A few of them seemed taken aback, or at least (rightfully) apprehensive at the sight of the menacing man in ebony armor, but with a stern nod from an Orc, who must have been their leader, they all steeled themselves and continued on with their script.  
  
I was ready to go along with it and get out of the cart as they demanded. Being more Nord-like didn’t have to mean being an idiot and going headfirst into a fight I was in no way prepared for. But even as Janan and I were obediently stepping down from the cart, I heard a defiant roar behind me.  
  
Olev was swinging his axe in a wide downward sweep, standing atop the bench. Unafraid of their arrows, he drew the attention of the bandits. On the one hand, I was relieved that he was taking the bandits’ eyes off of me; on the other, I was distressed that his aggressive seizure of the offensive role was instantly escalating the situation from highway robbery to an all-out battle. Not one to get between an axe-swinging Nord and a half-dozen highwaymen, I slid under the cart, pulling Janan by the arm to drag her with me.  
  
We huddled together in the mud, watching Olev’s footwork through the rungs of the wheels. For being so heavy, and no doubt weighed down by his massive armor, he danced between the feet of the bandits with a terrifying grace, and before long a hand, then an arm, then a head all dropped at those dancing armored boots of his. Shouts of battle subsided to screams of agony, shattering the calm of the forest.  
  
A hand reached down under the wagon, grabbing Janan by the hair. Her cry of terror ignited that fire of defensiveness in me and had me lunging at that hand with hands filled with ice. I wanted to set him on fire, but being under a wooden cart made that inadvisable. Shock would have been equally unhelpful, since it would have electrocuted poor Janan as well. So I gave that damn bandit a case of frostbite he wouldn’t forget, and bit his hand as hard as I could to make him recoil.  
  
I was pushing Janan closer to the front of the cart, presumably further from where anyone would try to take her, when another hand reach into our sanctuary and took purchase on my throat, strangling my scream.  
  
If he thought my fight was gone, he was wrong. I kicked and, no longer fearing for Janan, sent a wave of electricity through my furiously grasping hands. Unfortunately, his response to the shock was a tensing of his muscles in his hands that closed his hands even tighter on my neck. He was strangling me and I was electrocuting him, and neither of us were able or willing to be the first to let up.  
  
The pressure around my neck let up with the sickening sound of a crack and a spray of blood over me. The bandit who had held me fell away, and as I watched Olev lift his axe from the man’s shoulder, I could see that he had been torn almost in two down the length of his torso.  
  
“Oh, Mara!” I cursed. There was no time to get sick again. While Olev had killed two of the bandits, and I had left one without the use of his primary hand, we were still outnumbered. Alfarinn was nowhere to be seen, and Janan was just begging to be spared, hiding under the cart. Not that I blamed her one bit, since I would have preferred to be there with her, but now I saw the dire situation we were in.  
  
Olev wasn’t the least bit deterred or frightened. He swung his axe with abandon, and it was all I could do to keep out of his way while firing off bolts of lightning. My magicka was divided, since I was trying my best to heal my sore neck, but I managed to make the man I’d already wounded with ice reel back and fall to his knees, where Olev promptly finished him off with a swift drop of his weapon like an executioner to a man on the block.  
  
His mighty blow sent the highwayman’s head rolling, but also lodged the blade into the dirt, and took just a moment too long for him to pull back up to the ready. Taking advantage of the cumbersome motions of the axe, the Orc leader rushed in with his mace, bashing mercilessly against the thick ebony of Olev’s armor. While he couldn’t break through it, the force behind the blows was enough to dent in the hard material and shake the bounty hunter inside of his shell, doing a significant amount of damage.   
  
Both my hands reached for the Orc, shooting a spear of ice through his wooden shield. It splintered, but continued to carry so that his arm and side exploded with shrapnel of ice and shield alike. The Orc staggered backward, releasing a howl of rage and stampeding right for me. I was certain that I would die, and closed my eyes in fear, but heard Olev shout, “I’ll hold him off! Get the girl!”  
  
I opened my eyes to see the ebony-clad Nord pushing the Orc back with a relentless series of arcs and spins with his axe. He constantly switched his grip, altering the momentum and trajectory of the swings so that the Orc could not time an attack in any of his openings, forcing him back. Obediently following Olev’s instructions, I wheeled about to find Janan no longer under the cart. She thrashed wildly, but did nothing to drive away her assailant.  
  
Not but three steps away from Janan, with my hands already reaching for her, the bandit holding her drew his knife along her throat. For one horrible moment, we made eye contact, and I watched helplessly as she tried to scream and the light disappeared from her eyes. Once, I’d been in awe of her beauty. Now, I couldn’t see anything but the river of red pouring down her front, and the remorseless face of the man who killed her.  
  
Ice engulfed the man with a snarl from my lips and a flick of my wrists. The impact of my snowstorm pushed him back along the ground, and he put up a damn good fight against it before freezing solid where he stood.  
  
“Duck!” Olev’s voice commanded somewhere behind me.  
  
Just in time to watch a sword hum through the air directly above me, I dropped to the ground and scrambled along the loamy dirt to escape the flurry of swings from the last remaining bandit. A stab aimed for my head demanded that I lay back, and a downward lunge for my face prompted me to roll back beneath the cart. To him, the cart was but an inconvenience, and with a shocking display of strength, the sword-wielder kicked hard against the cart to make the whole thing capsize. The snap of wood broke the already panicking horse free of its bridle, making it bolt into the forest and out of sight.  
  
I placed a ward in front of me and directed a volley of icicles into the swordsman, yelping when his sword made contact with my translucent shield. “Olev!” I begged. I didn’t want to kill him. I really didn’t. But my choices were running out.  
  
I switched to electricity once more, and set both of my hands alight with sparks that shook the bandit’s whole body. His tremors were not ones of death, not yet, but I knew his body wouldn’t be able to handle much more. I prepared myself for another body with blood on my hands.  
  
An axe went down just inches in front of me, splitting the head, face, neck, and shoulders of the swordsman right in front of me. “Sorry. I thought that Orc would never drop. I got to you as soon as I could,” Olev said.  
  
The road was a mess. The cart, overturned and broken, lacked both its driver and horse who were now somewhere in the forest. Six bandits lay dead in various states of dismemberment and, in one case, cocooned in crystalline ice. And, by far the worst of it, innocent Janan was lifeless on the ground, drenched in a brilliant crimson that practically glowed in the sunlight.  
  
“Check her body,” Olev insisted. When I opened my mouth to argue, I only then realized how badly injured he was. From every crevice and crack in his armor, blood flowed freely. It looked as though he wore armor with a red lacquer.  
  
“Why would I do that?” I asked, horrified for so many reasons. It had been bad enough taking things from the body of the thief who’d tried to kill me; it was unimaginable that I should desecrate the corpse of the shy, quiet, innocent Redquard.  
  
“First of all, I’m bleeding out. Fast. If she had anything to help me, I could use it. Also, she was headed to Riften. Someone is going to have to get some bad news. Take something personal so that if anyone misses her, they won’t be kept waiting. Only fair.”  
  
I may not be the best healer, but I was at his side pressing healing magicka through the joints of the metal in his armor, asking every couple of seconds if he felt better.  
  
I managed to stabilize him, but I wasn’t skilled enough, nor did I have enough magicka, to do much else. He needed to get to a town where I could brew a potion, or someone could tend to him.  
  
With a bit more convincing, Olev persuaded me into gently rolling Janan onto her back, setting her respectfully off of the road, and placing flowers over her face and chest. Only after that did I lower myself to taking her possessions. An amulet of Mara had been strung around her neck. The poor soul had been on her way to get married. While I considered taking her book, I decided to leave it for her, setting it beneath her head like a pillow. Besides her amulet, I also took an interesting little wooden box out of the deep pocket of her skirt. The top of the box featured little slivers of metal, titled just a bit so that they rose from the surface of the box. The silvers, all different lengths and featuring little loops to make a hollow, created a haunting chime when plucked with fingertips, somewhere between the tonal qualities of a clear music box and an echoing high-pitched wind chime.  
  
These things would help me to find someone who had loved her, someone who had been waiting for her, so that I could deliver the bad news. Whoever was looking forward to her arrival in Riften deserved to know the truth.  
  
Half-carrying Olev, his mammoth-like weight held aloft by my narrow shoulder, we trudged our way to Shor’s Stone and arrived about two hours later.  
  
One of the miner’s took Olev in, and before long he was undressed, sprawled across a stranger’s bed as I bid him farewell. “You’re going the rest of the way on your own?” he asked skeptically. “On foot? By yourself?”  
  
“It’s how I’ve traveled most often,” I admitted. “Taking the carriage was my attempt at a safe and uneventful trip. I may as well just walk.” I gave his broad chest a pat, admiring my handiwork. It was bruised and bloody, but the wound was closed. For not being much of a healer, I could at least take pride in knowing that I had saved one life today.  
  
He winced at my touch, but otherwise kept his bravado intact. “I may not be the most chivalrous man, but I don’t much like the idea of you out there alone.”  
  
“If it’s because of that thousand-Septim deal—“  
  
Olev shrugged at the accusation. “After watching you fight like a damn harpy, can you blame me? I didn’t know you had that kind of fight in you. If we made it two thousand Septims…?”  
  
“I would still say no,” I said firmly, giving the bounty hunter a poke in the ribs.  
  
Whatever he was going to say next was choked on, and instead I heard hissed beneath his breath, “I bet you’d take it in a heartbeat if I looked like that damn brother of yours.”  
  
I poked him again. Harder. With my fist. “Let me get something straight. I’m not paying you off because I think you stand a chance against my brother. You wouldn’t last a minute in battle with him. Mocking him, or me, won’t make either of us take you more seriously. Because the fact of the matter is, I’m just going to pay you because if you do go after my brother, you’ll just slow him down, and that’s one minute of his time that can be used on something better than killing you. You are not worth the seconds it would take my brother to remove you from this world.” I sighed away the tension that was building up in my chest. “You’re a nice enough man, when it really counts, Olev. You had moments when you seemed like a genuinely good person. But you couldn’t compare to my brother. And I’ll pay off his bounty with Solitude just to keep other poor fools like you from getting in his way, too. Bounty or not, he is the Dohvakiin, and he is the greatest hero to walk Tamriel. Never, ever forget it.”  
  
  
_The truth is, Big Brother, I can’t shake the twist in my stomach. What if all this time, I’ve been following you, looking up to you, giving up every opportunity for love and happiness for you, only to find that you weren’t worth the sacrifice? You’ve been my hero my entire life, and that fact has shaped me and my destiny. And it’s not just my destiny I your hands now. It’s everyone’s._  
  
_I love you, Brother. I will not stop following you, or looking up to you, or worshiping you. Because if I can’t hold on to hope for you, then who can? We’d all truly be doomed then._


	10. In Which She Meets an Old Acquaintance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Riften, Riften, the city of thieves and intrigue! Brina's made it this far, and now is looking not only for Big Brother, but for a fortune of gold to get the bounty hunters off of his back following a little misunderstanding he was involved in at the emperor's cousin's wedding.

### Chapter Ten

Ten. Thousand. Septims. The words resounded in my head as though my skull were as empty as my coin purse. All I had to show for myself as I stomped my way for Riften was a satchel filled to the brim with random ingredients and a the hood of my cloak similarly weighed down by the flowers I was carrying in it. I knew how to make potions that could get me a lot of money, if I could find the right buyer. Someone who didn’t care if the effects were… mixed blessings. Probably a court mage, if they wanted to experiment with them, or maybe an apothecary who could purify it of negative effects. If I could find the right buyer, I might have a sizable fortune just waiting to be brewed.

About a mile from Riften, a noise behind me sent a shiver down my spine. Just starting to turn around to face whatever was sneaking up, my shoulders were caught by a strong arm that wound around my front, a hand with a powerful grip clasping my shoulder. Effectively ending any attempt I might have made to fight, a dagger flickered in front of my face and pointed toward my eye.

“You’re gon’ hold still, yeah? Don’ fight back, ‘n’you’ll be on your way jus’ fine.”

“If you’re trying to rob me, you’re a bit late,” I told him with frustration. “I was ambushed before Shor’s Stone. Not that I had anything for them to steal, either, save for my traveling companions.”

“Wha’s this then?” the highwayman asked, reaching for the coin purse at my hip and finding it just as I’d left it: empty, limp, and without even a pebble to fill it. He breathed heavily through his nose and went for my satchel. I cringed to think of him crushing anything precious, but an instant later and his hand flew out. “Yeughk! The heck you got in there?!”

“Giant’s toes and roots, mostly,” I explained. Well, to me those were treasures, even if most people would dismiss them as junk. “There might be some jazbay… not that you should eat them plain, since they’ve been stewing with the toes for a couple of days.”

The dagger disappeared from my sight, and the sound of feet shuffling across the road told me it was safe to turn around. My newest bandit friend hadn’t even bothered to tell me he wasn’t interested; he slipped off of the road and vanished into the forest without sparing me another word.

It was a relief not to get robbed of what little I had, but getting dismissed by a robber so callously did sting the pride a bit.

I almost reached Riften when a pair of eyes in the trees paused my step. For just a second we stared at each other, the Bosmer’s black eyes looking me up and down, judging me, weighing my potential. His face puckered in an expression of disappointment, and then he was gone. This one I hadn’t even needed to tell I was poor. He saw it from yards away. Had he been any closer, he probably could have smelled the poverty on me, too.

Three encounters with thieves before even getting to the city should have told me that the place was everything the rumors claimed and more. Still I was convinced that I would be safer and more comfortable in its walls than out here in the wilderness.

I walked through the night, and was met at sunrise with a gorgeous view of a shimmering lake, majestic fishing boats gliding across the surface, and a stone fortress hugging its shore. The rising sun revealed streaks of black across the stone walls that I had first thought were shadows. They appeared to be stains, like soot that had refused to be washed away despite countless rains. It also struck me how, since coming from the ancient Windhelm, the wooden structures and docks appeared surprisingly new, built hastily. Every time a sailor walked across the scaffolding, the entire dock shifted and swayed with his weight and the sound of creaking echoed across the water ominously. When the docks got busy with fishermen, I had to look away. Any moment, I thought, the whole thing would collapse. I couldn’t bear to watch.

A short distance from the gate, all out where the narrow rays of morning sun could warm them, a Khajiit caravan was camped. They weren’t the same group that had come to Whiterun on occasion, but like them, they didn’t look like criminals. I’d had my share of run-ins with thieves these days, and they looked less threatening than any of the citizens roaming about. How could anyone think they couldn’t be trusted inside of the city? How could anyone with big fuzzy ears and twitching whiskers be too dangerous to allow inside?

By now the town apothecary was probably open, and I could make use of his tools to start making the potions I would sell. As I approached the gate, my confidence rose. I was out of the dangerous woods, coming into a safe, secure city, where I would make enough money to lift my brother’s bounty and put a stop to his current hunter!

Everything was going to be okay!

“Hold there!”

I stopped obediently, looking to the guard who had spoken. It was common for a guard to check on new visitors, just to be safe. Back in Whiterun, Leif was often posted at the gate, and never had much of a fuss so long as those coming into the city weren’t clearly troublemakers of some sort. I smiled at him, ready to answer whatever little questions he had. I was obviously unarmed, and not even wearing mage robes. I didn’t look like a spy, a thief, a killer, anything. Certainly he wouldn’t actually have any issue with letting me right in after I told him my name and what city I had come from.

“Before I let you into Riften, you need to pay the visitor’s tax,” the guard informed me matter-of-factly.

My smile fell away. “T- _tax_?” I repeated, dumbfounded. “But why? For what?”

“For the privilege of entering the city,” he said sharply. I clearly wasn’t supposed to ask any questions, because his annoyance grew with every word he was bothered to speak. “What does it matter?”

I’d come this far. I had eaten the last of my food, and had no money to get more. I had no supplies, no tent or bedroll or anything for walking to the next town, or even just back to Shor’s Stone. Even if the tax was a single Septim, I couldn’t pay. “Please, isn’t there any way you can let me in? I’m begging you! I don’t have any money! Even if I had, three different times on the way here I ran into bandits! The only reason I wasn’t robbed blind by them was because I had no money to be stolen!”

Fear began to settle in my chest. I was hungry. I was almost a day away from Shor’s Stone, and walking all the way back seemed like a death wish considering how many thieves dwelled in the birches. To set up a camp, to make a fire for the night, would attract them from miles around. To not be allowed into the city might just spell the end of me.

“If you can’t pay the visitor’s tax, you can’t come in,” he said sternly. “Simple as that. This town doesn’t need any more beggars and thieves.”

“I’m not a beggar, I’m just poor!” I insisted. “Please, I need into the city! I can’t go all the way back to Shor’s Stone, and I’ll be damned if I have to go back to Windhelm! Please, can’t you make an exception? Just this once?”

“Not a chance. And you’re doing an awful lot of begging for a woman who’s not a beggar. Get out of my sight.”

“I can pay the tax later! Let me in and I’ll pay you in just a few hours!”

The guard squared his shoulders and stepped closer so that he loomed over me menacingly. And what could I do? I would never strike a guard!

If I had a tail, it would have been between my legs as I retreated. What was I supposed to do now? I needed inside! I didn’t have any tools to make potions, so the ingredients I carried were all but useless. Walking back to Shor’s Stone, knowing how many people loomed in those woods like wolves on the hunt, was a terrible prospect. The fact that I’d gotten all the way to Riften unscathed was a miracle.

I was trudging back along the road, headed north since I had nowhere else to go, and heard a chattering sound to my left. There, the dignified-looking Khajiit under the main tent beckoned me, his slit pupils wide like he was taking me in with great interest.

“Uhmmm…?” I began, walking to him uncertainly.

“This one knows very well the sadness of being turned away at the gates,” the cat-man purred. For someone who never went into the cities he visited, he looked well-groomed. His outfit was fine and clean, his silver fur meticulously combed. “But you are desperate. The road is not a home to you as it is to us.”

“If I have to walk alone to the next city, I’ll probably be killed in my sleep,” I confirmed. “Is there another way in?”

The trader’s face split into a smile that was devilish to say the very least, with sharp fangs that glimmered like they were made of steel. “Why, through the door.”

“There’s a tax—“

“And there’s a key,” he told me, reaching his hand out. What kind of key could he have? What sort of key could get me in, right in front of the guard who turned me away?

Whatever he was handing to me, I took without hesitation. Opening my hand, it was a ring made of gold and set with a sparkling sapphire so big that I could see my reflection in every one of its perfectly sculpted facets. “This is—“

“Guards!!” the Khajiit exploded. Every other Khajiit in the camp turned on me, hissing and spitting with sudden fury. “Guards! There’s a thief! Thief!!”

“But this is yours!!” I cried out, confused as I’d ever been in my life.

“She picked this ring right out of my pocket! Such a fool to think she could steal from a Khajiit!”

“Stop!! Stop yelling! I didn’t steal anything!!”

The first guard to respond was not the one by the gate who had turned me away, though he was now watching, looking rigid as a slab of stone. Instead, a skinny soldier that had apparently been charged with keeping an eye on the caravan came to my side, clamping his gauntlet on my arm. Even though I was the accused party, his eyes narrowed suspiciously on the feline trader through the slits in his helmet. “What is this ruckus?”

A furry hand and fatally sharp claw pointed my way. “This girl has stolen a most precious ring! This one demands she be punished!”

“Give it back,” the guard began, only to be hissed over by a chorus of angry cats.

“That is not enough! The ring must be returned, yes, but she must be punished!!”

The guard rolled his eyes. “The fine is twenty-five Septims.”

“I don’t have twenty-five Septims! I don’t have any at all!” I whimpered.

“To prison with the bitch!” a pretty chestnut-colored Khajiit lady growled. Her face flickered in what looked almost like a wink.

“Prison?!” I gasped, still not catching on. “Wait, please!”

A rough yank against my hand sent the golden ring right back in the trader’s waiting hands. The guard grumbled at having to take me all the way to the prison, saying something about the paperwork, and began to shove me along the road.

I was pushed all the way to the gate, past the tax-collecting guard who thumbed the sword at his side while he watched me, and into the city.

Not only did I get into Riften, but I got a free bed and a small meal to greet me. The prison was bright, warm, and had better beds than many inns I’d slept in. A hunk of stale bread was still good eating as far as I was concerned, and while I wanted badly to get right to making potions and earning money, the detour was a shocking relief. My bed was a lot more comfortable than Olev or Janan’s shoulders had been.

At one point, after I’d been dozing in and out of consciousness for a couple of hours, I saw a steel helmet peek at me through the door that led to the offices. It shook its head and whispered to someone I couldn’t see, “Go ahead and tell Brynjolf all about it. I’m sure he would rather have the gold, but if she’s sneaky as that, he may just get something else of interest.”

Dungeons rarely have windows, so the passage of time is almost always a mystery to those unfortunate enough to be locked in them. The switch of guards as their shifts ended seemed to be, I estimated, about every four hours. By that measure, it would have been just past midnight when a Bosmer was led to the cell beside mine.

“I want to talk to Vidar,” the Bosmer said.

“Why?” the guard sneered as he locked the cell door. “You think I don’t know he’s more in Brynjolf’s pocket than the jarl’s? Because he can mix the papers around, change the records? Get you out?”

“It’s easier for all of us that way. I know it doesn’t reflect well on you when I break out of here. Why not let it look legitimate?” the Bosmer suggested. “Vidar can even arrange for my crimes to be paid for. Just let him know that I’m here.”

“Right,” the guard laughed. Walking away, he smacked the bars of every cell that he crossed. “Pay for your crimes with stolen money. You thieves guild types never lose your sense of humor.”

Thieves guild. I was rolling out of bed and tip-toeing to the edge of my cell just as the guard disappeared from sight. “You’re with the guild?” I whispered.

I could barely see the next cell over. Leaning as close as I could to the bars gave me just a narrow view of the Bosmer, but I could hear him right on the other side of the wall from me. “You,” he said. “I saw you on the way to the city. But I could tell that you didn’t have anything worth taking.”

“So, it operates the same way here as it does in Cyrodiil?” I asked eagerly, even though he hadn’t directly answered my question. “The guild doesn’t steal from or hurt the destitute?”

“I never said that. You just weren’t worth my time.”

“Because, when I was in Cyrodiil, and I was homeless and had no money for food, members of the thieves guild—well, they never told me they were in the guild, but I had enough reason to believe—used to help me when I crossed them. They stole from the rich, gave to the poor, like the old legends of the Grey Fox. I didn’t take the money, since it was easy enough to tell that it was stolen, but they gave me food. One time, a lady who seemed like she was very important gave me a place to sleep for the two nights I was in Chorrol. I don’t exactly approve of breaking the law, and I’d never do it myself, but I could really use the help.”

He was laughing before I finished. “No. The guild in Riften doesn’t help the poor and needy. Because, turns out, practically everyone in Riften is poor and needy, and those in the guild being the worst off of them all. It’s cute that you think any of us would give a shit about you, but if you want handouts, you’re in the same boat as the rest of them.”

Ouch. “What about Brynjolf?” I ventured. I pressed my face against the bars until I could barely see the angular face of the Wood Elf beside me. “One of the guards said he’d be interested in me, and then the other when mentioned him when talking to you.”

“Brynjolf? As far as it concerns you, he’s just a nice man with a stall in the market. I’d stop asking questions right about now if I were you.”

 

_25th of First Seed,_  
 _Dear Big Brother,_

_Riften is as scary as they warned me and more. At first I was relieved to hear that the rampant crime in the city was by the hands of the Thieves Guild. If you ever see the journal I left in Bruma, it’s filled with stories of mysterious people with unclear occupations and connections who, while it was never said in so many words, were almost definitely part of the guild. They helped me tremendously my first couple of years on your trail, when I was still learning how to survive. Homeless and poor, I was shown pity by them. I thought, just maybe, I might receive that kind of treatment here._

_Now I know that this leg of the guild functions very differently. Almost, I suppose, as one would expect a crime syndicate to run. Most people in this city are impoverished, with just a few citizens bragging astonishing wealth; to the guild, though, everyone is just as much of a target._

_Even if I can make ten thousand Septims, how in Mara’s name am I going to hold onto it long enough to send it? I think the moment any gold hits my hand, it’ll be up someone else’s sleeve in an heartbeat._

 

In the morning they released me from the prison, and I noted that the cell beside mine was empty. Bright and early, before any shops were open, I was set loose and allowed to roam freely. No one asked for me to pay the tax this time.

The city was beautiful when standing on land. Pretty arching bridges led to an island of stone and wood built over the lake, and over the railing I could see the canal and several doors. I could image how badly it stunk down by the water, but it looked like more people lived down there than above. On land, the biggest and most prominent buildings appeared to actually be owned by very few people. The sheer size of the houses suggested that half the city could live in them, but it seemed that only a handful of families occupied the whole district. Among the mansions was also the temple devoted to Mara, just like the stranger in the inn had told me. Funny how the faces of Mara on the banners looked so like that unusual Breton woman…

The streaks of black that I had observed outside the city were here as well. The wood on the buildings was all much newer than most of the stonework, which could have been hundreds of years old. But anything wooden seemed quickly constructed, easily rotted away and broken and easily replaced. When I waked through the graveyard on my way around the temple, the oldest of the tombstones were stained with soot or damaged, and a sizeable collection all gathered together listed ‘the fire’ under their names.

I worked my way over the bridges, looking at every door I crossed to try and figure out where the town’s alchemist was set up. Did they not have one?

The only good thing I found so far was that the canal below the bridges looked deep enough that it wouldn’t hurt me to fall from that height. It’d been a few weeks since I’d fallen from someplace high, so I figured I was due for another tumble. If only I could land like a Khajiit. Or levitate.

By now people were filing up the square across the bridges. All around a central well, dozens of merchants hawked their wares, shouting down potential buyers. None were alchemists, far as I could tell. Where else could the apothecary be?!

“…genuine falmer blood elixir…!”

My ears perked up. I followed the deep, melodic voice around to the other side of the square to find a tall, dark-haired Nord standing proudly with a tall red bottle.

“Make love like a sabre cat!” he promised. “Crush your foes like a giant! My genuine falmer blood elixir is the miracle potion to cure all ailments! Just twenty Septims, and it can be yours!”

Not only was this apparently the only alchemist in town, he had an unbelievable offer. He was even gathering quite the crowd. A blond woman with a symbol of Dibella around her neck handed him a bag of gold, and took the potion from his hands. “This lady has just bought herself the only potion she’ll ever need! Who’s next, then?” He waved another bottle, flipping it in his hands with a flourish like a juggler. “Who else wants to memorize the entire contents of a whole library in mere minutes? You, sir? Only twenty gold! It’s a damn steal for the elixir that’ll change your life!”

I knew it was too good to be true. Arcadia was the best alchemist I’d ever met, and she only ever bothered with the ears of falmer. Even then, she didn’t care much for getting those in stock, since it was primarily good for poisons and she was far more concerned with supplying potions to heal her customers.

But something about his voice, the charming lyrical quality to it, the way he… articulated every word had me moving through the crowd to get a closer look. I told myself that I was just interested because he seemed to be the only alchemist in town, that I knew the elixir couldn’t possibly be everything he said it was, but he was just so damn _convincing!_

“Is this another one of your scams, Brynjolf?” a Dunmer beside me asked.

Brynjolf! Now at the front of the crowd, looking this mysterious Brynjolf face-to-face, I tried to decide if he looked like a thieves guild man. A circular amulet with three bejeweled spokes expanding from the center dangled over his chest. It looked beautiful and fancy, but what thief would flaunt that kind of prize? Also, he was so loud, so confident. The thieves I knew clung to the shadows, were soft-spoken and would never put themselves at the center of attention.

And since when did thieves get so charming? He winked at me when he saw my eyes locked on the elixir in his hands. “Well, lass? What about you?”

I tried to think of what Arcadia would say if she were faced with this sort of “miracle” potion, but all that came to mind was the way she nudged me toward men and told me how badly I needed a husband. Maybe she would ask if it was a love potion, and proceed to pour it into my mouth.

“What else is in it?” I stuttered. “It can’t be pure blood, right?”

His dark eyes flashed with deprecation, but his smile stayed right in place. “Ah, secret recipe! I couldn’t just give up my secrets. All you need to know if that falmer blood in this elixir will change your life!” He directed the last part at the whole audience. Another person stepped up and handed over gold and received a bottle in exchange.

“Is it arrowroot?” I asked. “You said it makes you strong, right? Is there arrowroot?” Curiosity was beginning to pique. I racked my brain for ingredients I knew could do all of these things he claimed. Fortifying strength could be arrowroot, or maybe garlic. Increased intelligence could be a few things, too, but what grew in this region? “What about carrots? And when you say that I can make love like a sabre cat, are you saying it’ll improve agility, or endurance? Because I know I’ve seen leeks grow in Skyrim…”

Brynjolf licked his lips, glanced over the crowd and lifted his brows pointedly at someone I couldn’t see, and then said in a hushed voice, “I mean it now, quiet down.”

In Riften, asking questions is a dangerous thing. Even when you think that the questions and their answers must be harmless, and even if they are, the act of asking in itself rubs many people the wrong way and directs attention to things they don’t want you thinking about.

This was learned later.

“I just find it hard to believe that falmer blood is able to do so much. How did you treat it? Would drinking it result in Cannibal’s Prion afflictions? That can happen when you eat the remains of man or mer, you know. If it’s not carefully purified through an alembic—“

By now my chatter was making the whole crowd uncomfortable, though I was too absorbed in the alchemical mysteries to think anything of it.

His voice was so low that, even right in front of him, I could barely hear him say, “Last chance, lass. Go bother someone else.”

That voice was so charming and musical, I wanted to obey. Weakly nodding, I stepped backward, then made my way through the crowd.

Even though he’d told me it was my last chance, though, the signal had been made earlier than that. The silent communication I’d witness earlier was acted upon already, and when I was about halfway through the crowd, I was swept off of my feet by a pair of men in brown leather, cowls over their heads. A hand covered my mouth until I was roughly deposited on the ground in a nearby alley.

“Ouch! Hey, what’s the matter?” I tried to rock forward to get back to my feet, but a muddy boot pushed against my shoulder to knock me right back down. My back hit the stone wall behind me painfully. “Wh-what are you doing?” Shit, I was being robbed _again_ , I thought. “I don’t have any money, or anything worth taking!”

“You’d be surprised,” a gravelly voice told me ominously. “But we’re not here mug you. You were just putting our boss in an uncomfortable situation, and taking your tongue out here will make much less of a scene than if we did it right in the middle of Plankside.”

“Cut out my tongue?! For asking about a ridiculous miracle potion?!” I balked.

“If you’ll get that nosey over that little thing, you expect us to believe you won’t get nosey over other things? Important things? It’s being safe rather than sorry, that’s all. New faces in this town rarely spell good news for us, especially if they’re the type who like to ask questions.” He had no hint of malice in his voice. His eyes revealed no pleasure in my prone position, nor did his companion standing behind him seem all too thrilled about acting like a common thug. Straight faces, grimly lowered, and then a small dagger drawn solemnly from a lacquered sheath…

The shape of his beard was unusually distracting considering the predicament I was in. It was soft, but rugged, and flattered his strong face and long, straight nose. His brow was stern, giving way at the top to hair the color of warm venison stew, mostly golden brown with a hint of red hues. The hair was pulled back to where I couldn’t quite see behind the hood, but strands had escaped from his slight widow’s peak and fell down to his clavicle. Beside the sheath to his dagger was a sword, stamped with the simple insignia of a smith in Riverwood.

I knew that gravelly voice sounded familiar…!

“By the Eight and Talos!” I swore in amazement. “ _Thrynn_ , is that you?”

If he’d been expecting any reaction to leaning down to cut my tongue out of my mouth, that had not been it. He went still, and I saw the man behind him lean forward and tilt his ear toward us.

That was all the confirmation I needed. “You saved me! I went wandering right for Helgen, not knowing it was a bandit camp! You told me to get out before the others saw me, and you told me how to get to Riverwood. Alvor took me in. All I had to say was that your sword and bow were in good condition, and he fed me and let me sleep at his hearth.” The dagger he’d been brandishing hesitantly retreated back into its sheath. My smile grew wide. “I can’t believe it. I never thought I’d get the chance to thank you for saving my life! Mara be praised, I can finally tell you what a blessing you were!”

Thrynn glanced over his shoulder to his companion, who smirked and raised an eyebrow. In response, Thrynn scrunched his nose and shook his head, which prompted a sly backward tilt of the other thief’s head. It was painfully clear that I was being left out of a complete conversation taking place silently in front of me.

A sound I couldn’t hear made both thieves glance to the entrance of the alley, then back to each other. The yet unnamed thief gave Thrynn a single nod of his head, and Thrynn reciprocated after a short delay.

I was trying to put the pieces together right when Brynjlf himself stepped into the alley, looking between me, Thrynn, and the other man each in turn.

Whatever their silent agreement had been, Thrynn’s cringe when his guildmate spoke suggested that it was already broken: “Thrynn was trying to scare her so she’d mind her own business—you know, that whole ‘cut out your tongue’ line that he does so well—and turns out, she’s an old girlfriend of his! What do you know! I thought he only went for deer and shit.”

“No, I just met her once. It was a few months after I parted ways with my old clan. I tried joining up with a new band, just to see if those glory days could be relived, who were set up in the ruins of Helgen. I was with them a couple days when this one,” he nodded to me, “came knocking on the gate. So I told her to get the fuck away. A few days later and you came through, told me that there was a place for me here with the guild,” he explained to Brynjolf. “I was with that band less than a week. She had perfect timing to wander through the pass. A few days earlier or later and she’d have been shot down.”

No matter how many times I tried to swallow my nerves, the lump in my throat held strong.

Brynjolf’s eyes on me were softer than they were before, inquisitive more than anything else. “And what are you doing here in Riften?”

“Looking for my brother,” I answered instantly, drawing a nod of recognition from Thrynn. “Also, I need ten thousand gold to pay off a bounty he has in Solitude.”

Both of the lesser thieves gaped at the number, but Brynjolf’s charming face widened into a roguish grin. “Well, now, in that case, I think we can help each other. What’s your name, lass?”


	11. In Which She Makes New Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brina has come a long way, from Whiterun to Windhelm and now to Riften, in search of her older brother. But now, finding him takes a lower priority to protecting him and restoring his repuation, and to do that, Brina needs ten thousand Septims to pay off his bounty and to turn his bounty hunters away. For chronically-poor Brina, that is a serious undertaking, but lucky for her, she's making the acquaintance of some people who are happy to help her.

### Chapter Eleven

It takes a certain kind of idiot to agree to a group of thieves that you’ll meet with them again, without any idea of when or where or even if they truly want to work with you to a greater extent than robbing you blind. And, as badly as I wanted to figure out where in Oblivion that alchemist’s shop was, I knew I couldn’t sell any of those potions yet. Wandering around with gold in every pocket was just asking for too much trouble, especially since I wouldn’t know when my new ‘friends’ would appear again.  
  
The clear, sunny skies did nothing to make the city seem safer. Even as I had stumbled out of the alleyway, alone, after being bid farewell-for-now by the guildmates, I was amazed by how much I started to notice. The throngs in the market were speckles with men in dark clothes who wove, seemingly directionless, between people, sliding things into and out of pockets as they went and pulling coin purses from belts without anyone being the wiser. Surely these people knew by now! Surely everyone had to be aware that this was going on, and on such a large scale!  
  
My question was answered a minute later, when a yelp of surprise rang from across the marketplace. Only a few shoppers bothered to look to see what had happened, while the rest kept right on with their business despite the trio of guards who rushed into the crowd and extracted a skinny man in leather, kicking and struggling against them.  
  
At some point, I swear I felt a hand slip into my satchel. I cried out at the sudden sensation, but saw no one around me and, upon opening my bag, realized nothing was missing.  
  
There was, however, a new addition.  
  
With a quick glance around to try and catch whoever had given it to me, as well as to be sure that no one was reading over my shoulder, I unfolded the torn bit of parchment.  
  
 _Canal— North Plankside—Sundown._  
  
Well, they got back to me quickly. They were nothing if not prompt.  
  
So, I had all day to occupy myself. First order of business led me back to the Benevolence of Mara. Despite being the middle of the day, it was shockingly vacant. It seemed that the real religion in the city was the commerce taking place across the bridges. The scene was even more grim from the inside. Not a single person in the temple was a worshiper. Everyone I saw wore the goldenrod robes of the clergy.  
  
“Welcome! Blessings of Mara upon you!”  
  
“The Benevolence of Mara welcomes you!”  
  
I was assaulted with greetings as the priests turned their attention on me. Did so few people ever come here to pray that it was such an event whenever someone entered?  
  
I dared to ask the very question.  
  
A Redguard priest with an easy, content smile shook his head slowly. “We mostly only see people for wedding ceremonies. Otherwise, not many of Riften’s fine people come here. They prefer to pray into their mead.” He sighed a wistful breath. “And what good it’s done, indeed. The world is in chaos, dragons wreak havoc across the land, and it is all because they have forsaken the gods in favor of their drunkenness.”  
  
Oh. That was a sore nerve. “I’m sorry, you think the dragons are because of… drinking? Mara is against drinking?”  
  
Maramal nodded. “Mara teaches us to remain sober, and to focus on family, piety, and love.”  
  
“But you can’t be pious, and feel love, and focus on family while drinking?”  
  
“Not to the fullest extent of your heart,” Maramal explained patiently.  
  
“I… disagree,” I said, shocking myself that I was about to get into a debate with a priest. But the memories of sitting at Arcadia’s hearth after the store closed with a bottle of wine and hours and hours of talking about our homeland, of dancing drunk under the Gildergreen with that handsome Companion holding me against the cold, of laughing with Elrindir and Anoriath, and shouting insults across the New Gnisis Cornerclub all starkly contradicted his idea of sober love. “The friendships I’ve made in Skyrim, and the happiest memories I have here all involved a fair amount of drunkenness. People have gone from acquaintances to family over the course of a night of partying, and you may not think anything of that, but those are the most precious moments of my life. The love I found in taverns was worth the hangovers and more.”  
  
His smile was patient, but his eyes look on a glazed appearance, looking past me as he nodded. “I’ sorry you think so. But one day, I hope you realize how much closer you can be to Mara without intoxication getting in your way.”  
  
To him, I was just another lost soul. The Breton woman in Kynesgrove made me think otherwise, though. Her silken words, bidding me to go to the Benevolence, to become a priestess, whispered through the wooden planks of the temple. Somehow, I wasn’t convinced that Mara really minded that my friendships often included a fair amount of booze. I like to think Mara and I had an understanding about that.  
  
“Well, that wasn’t why I came. Not that I’m not here to pray, too, but,” I pulled Janan’s amulet from under the neckline of my dress and presented it to Maramal, “this belonged to a woman who was on her way to Riften. She was killed by bandits before reaching Shor’s Stone. I think she was on her way to get married.”  
  
The priest took the amulet with a mournful expression, his lips twisting in pain. He certainly had the compassion part down pat—I could see his heart wrench at the sight with all the agony I’d felt watching her die in front of me. Helplessness, regret, sorrow, we felt them together for the poor woman.  
  
“Her name was Janan, travelling from Windhelm,” I continued gently. From my satchel, I produced the little music box I’d found in her pocket. “This was hers as well. It looked important, or at least sentimental. I thought it might mean something to her groom.”  
  
“Yes. She was supposed to get married here the first week of Rain’s Hand.” He took the wooden box and turned it over in his hands, finally handing it back to me. “I appreciate you bringing this as well, but we cannot keep it here. It’s a music box from Hammerfell, and while it probably was quite meaningful, it is often associated with Mephala.”  
  
I felt like he’d just splashed ice water into my face. “Wait, you think Janan was a Daedric worshipper?”  
  
“No, no,” he said hurriedly. He reached out to pluck one of the tines demonstratively. It gave a sweet soprano chime that echoed into the tube at the base of the tine, where it rang like a wind chime. The other surrounding tines hummed quietly, resulting in a haunting harmony. “It isn’t necessarily proof of Mephala worship. It’s simply that these are symbolic of Mephala in many circles. While I do believe it was, to her, just a music box, as long as it is representative of Daedric worship, we cannot keep it in the Benevolence.”  
  
“What does Mephala have to do with music boxes?” I asked, looking around the wooden surface for curses against creation, or something equally damning.  
  
“The way it rings,” Maramal explained. “They say that Mephala pulls a single string in her web of intrigue to see how the whole web shakes. When you strike just one note, the whole box vibrates and the surrounding notes sing as well. It’s common enough in Hammerfell, but it’s symbolic relevance makes it inappropriate for an Aedric temple.”  
  
“Oh…” Strange. To me, it just looked like a really cute instrument. “How will I get it to her betrothed?”  
  
Maramal set a hand down on my shoulder with all the familiarity and love of a long-time friend or cousin. “I will inform him of Janan’s tragic passing, but I will let him know that, should he still come to Riften, you will have that for him.”  
  
I wasn’t sure how long I would be in Riften, but if needed I was confident that someone could hold onto the music box just in case I had to leave in the next two weeks. “Alright. I will keep it safe until then.”  
  
“Thank you again. It is dreadful news, but we shall pray for Janan and hope that Lady Mara extends her love to her in the afterlife.”  
  
Before I left and after I’d prayed for Janan before the gilt statue of the Lady, I made sure to get directions to the elusive apothecary. Down by the canal, across a narrow plank bridge to the island of the city known as “Plankside,” at the very edge of the city proper was a hole in the stone filled by a swollen wooden door that took a determined shoulder to open. Inside the room was dim, dank, and dark with air that hung heavily with the smell of brine and fouler things. I began to wonder how much moisture I could breathe with the air before drowning.  
  
A feeble old man sat in the corner at a short table with three solid wooden legs and one long bone that might have been a femur. Across from him was a pretty girl about my age. Her hair and eyes were dark like mine, but she had the height of a Nord and her hair had an incredible way of sitting in a neat, organized manner. With a self-conscious hand, I tried to smooth my wild mane and felt the curls bounce right back into place.  
  
“Excuse me,” I said, drawing two annoyed glowers my direction. I pointed meekly to the supplies tucked away in a corner. “Do you mind if I use your tools?”  
  
The girl rolled her eyes and turned away while the elderly man, apparently the master alchemist, gave me a curt nod. “Just don’t be too long,” he grumbled.  
  
Arcadia always told me to keep my recipes and notes in a journal, but she could never convince me to desecrate the journal I’d been writing for Brother. So, just to prove a point to her, I had made a mission of memorizing everything that I could. I knew what ingredients could do what, how to garner the best results, how to intensify certain effects and quiet others, and I made a point of being prepared before stepping to the table.  
  
Ten giant’s toes rolled across the little table and earned me another glance from the quietly talking pair. I set them in the calcinator first, so that they could be reduced to ash by the time I needed them. Then I crushed mountain flowers and butterfly wings together, moving quickly as not to be in the way, or under their glares, for any longer than necessary.  
  
I had gotten through my first ten potions, all of them being made with the giant’s toes, and started on tearing the gills out from the mushrooms I’d gathered south of Shor’s Stone. By then I felt more than just their sidelong glances every now and again: their full attention was on me, their eyes burning holes in my back as I tried to work as quickly and quietly as possible.  
  
“What have you got there?” a wavering voice asked. The old alchemist had wandered over to watch over my shoulder as I worked. When I turned my head to face him, I saw that the Nord woman was close behind him, lips pursed tight like she’d been sucking on jazbay leaves.  
  
“Some, ah, potions,” I answered obviously. Seeing his face scrunch up in annoyance, I added, “I’m trying to make potions with the greatest quantity and magnitude of effects that I can. Though the effects are going to be a bit mixed, positive and negative, I was hoping to find a buyer either interested in them as a study, or one with enough aptitude to purify the effects and make sellable potions out of them.” It wasn’t an unheard of practice, but it was overall risky. After all, the common apothecary didn’t care about alchemy as an art and didn’t care to examine effects, and fewer still wanted to be troubled to buy a potion that they would need to finish.  
  
“What sort of effects?” the woman asked, inching forward curiously. Her dark eyes scanned the table, trying to make sense of the collection of vastly different ingredients.  
  
I couldn’t help it; a smile split my face, and I was rambling along like Arcadia used to. I pointed to the different ingredients, listing out all of the most common known effects and how I was going to combine, magnify, or isolate any given power as of yet dormant within them.  
  
The old chemist ‘s bushy white brows lifted, and the narrow black lines over the lady’s eyes lowered. “You know all of this by heart?” he said.  
  
Proudly, I nodded. “I’ve dabbled in alchemy since I was very young, and a few years ago it became my only livelihood. I was recently… pulled away from an apprenticeship with an extremely talented alchemist in Whiterun, and I learned a lot from her as well.” My smile grew wistful as I looked back down at the bits and pieces that would soon be in narrow vials, completely unrecognizable save for the inherent abilities that would be manifested only to the drinker.  
  
“You’re very passionate,” he noted. He nodded toward his own apprentice. “Ingun here shares that sort of passion. But I always tell her, until she can work out simple concoctions with her eyes shut, she’ll never be ready to master more advanced recipes.” He gave Ingun a nudge. “See! It’s not a waste of time. Now, complaining about it,  _that’s_  a waste of time.”  
  
For a while they continued to watch me, and as I finished up and cleaned the supplies, the dark woman tapped my shoulder. Since she’d been staring me down with a bitter expression since I’d walked in, I was shocked to hear her say, “I want to buy those potions you made.”  
  
Her master was equally taken aback. “What do you think you’re going to do with those?”  
  
“I’m going to purify them,” she replied indignantly. “I know I have the skill and the talent for it. You keep on giving me novice tasks, but I know I can do more!”  
  
She may be promising, but her master’s telling frown made me shrink with embarrassment for the girl. If he didn’t think she could do it, though, she looked only determined to prove him wrong.  
  
“I can’t sell them yet,” I said quickly, before any more could be said between the two. “I will certainly accept your offer, but I can’t keep that kind of gold on me as long as I’m staying in Riften.”  
  
Ingun’s posture straightened, and her head tilted even further back and nostrils flared like a wolf considering whether or not to lunge on a rabbit. “Then I suppose I’ll just have to wait,” she huffed in a tone that was anything but patient.  
  
I just had to hope that she wasn’t as willing to go to great lengths to get what she wanted like so many others in this city.  
  
The little glass vials that rattled in my satchel were far less to be worried about than the clinking of gold, I reminded myself. No one who saw me would think that I had much, and would probably be dismissed by any thieves instantly, assuming Ingun didn’t advertise the treasures I carried.  
  
For all the potions, if Ingun was indeed intent on buying all of them, I estimated a profit of about seven thousand Septims. And, while that was a staggering sum, the likes of which I had never even seen before, it still left me with three thousand left to earn.  
  
Three thousand Septims was more than I had ever made my whole life!  
  
The canal within the city was closed off from the lake proper by a tall wooden gate in the water. Supposedly they closed it at night to deter smugglers from making use of the convenient waterway, but I had yet to see the thing open at any time. After witnessing the gall these thieves had, it wasn’t hard to believe that they would make use of such an avenue in broad daylight if it were made available to them. It was in this gate’s shadow that I felt confident I was supposed to be waiting, there on the north side of Plankside, by the canal. What felt like an hour was spent just standing around in the growing cold, shuffling my feet and holding my breath every time a guard looked at me. I must have been about as conspicuous as a person can get. All I was missing was the leather garb of the guild, and they would have known exactly what I was up to.  
  
Not that I knew what I was up to. I was waiting, unsure if I was making a huge mistake or about to reap a grand reward for my saint-like faith in untrustworthy strangers.  
  
Behind me, the creak of rusted iron hinges startled me inches into the air. Down a dark, claustrophobia-inducing corridor in the stone, about the most suspicious-looking alleyway anyone could conceive to build, a door with wood rotting out of its iron fittings swung open.  
  
“Good, you’re here,” Thrynn said. His hood was gone for now, revealing his long hair in all its glory, left down and wild around his war-painted face. “If you didn’t show, it would have put Mercer in an even worse mood. Bastard’s been on me, Brynjolf, and Vipir as it is because of you.”  
  
“I didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”  
  
“You didn’t. And you’ll be doing a lot more to help us, anyway, if what Brynjolf says works out as he plans.” He beckoned me to follow, and against every ounce of good judgment I should have had, I followed him into the shadows.   
  
“What exactly does he have in mind?” I asked. “You do realize I’m not a thief, right? I’m clumsy as a goblin and I’m blessed with a conscience.”  
  
The stench that met me took my breath, drawing a twist of Thrynn’s brows on me. I waved off his concerns and dug through the glass vials in my satchel and pulled a leftover clump of lavender from the bottom to hold over my nose. If I’d known that we were going into the sewers, I’d have found some kind of scarf to tie the flowers directly against my face!  
  
For a sewer, it was shockingly populated. In every corner and tucked into each little dead end, breathing bodies huddled and hissed, including humans, skeevers, and other things I wasn’t sure I wanted to investigate. Flickering torches that filled narrow tunnels with hazy light and suffocating pitch smoke gave me a more-than-adequate view of the murky water my boots trudged through. With my hand that wasn’t clutching lavender like a holy symbol, I hiked Suvaris’s skirt over my knees and looped Missus Loreius’s cloak in my arm to keep from sludge ruining the only clothes I had.  
  
“You won’t be stealing, exactly,” Thrynn admitted. “But you will be helping us. Brynjolf’s newest recruit was sent off on a goose-chase; apparently, we’ve got some sort of rival guild or… something that’s been fucking with us. A lot of resources are going into that, since supposedly it’s the reason our guild has fallen on hard times. So, if the rest of us are going to get back to making real money, we need to make up for lost hands. You won’t be in the thick of things, but you’ll be making our jobs much easier.”  
  
He didn’t say that I wouldn’t be breaking the law, though, which kept my face set in its skeptical pout. To be honest, I wasn’t so sure I’d be able to go through with this. The further we got into the sewers, the darker the corners became, the more I realized that I was trapped. Not only could I not get out of this labyrinth on my own, there was no way I could escape these new friends of mine. I was getting in over my head, and there was nowhere to go but deeper.  
  
At one point, Thrynn held his hand out to me. “You’ll want to stay right on my heels here. Unless you’re not fond of both your feet.”  
  
I took a deep breath of lavender before I surrendered that hand to him, allowing the stalks of the flowers to get crush between our hands. His grip was unexpectedly tight; he probably wasn’t used to leading people through, and wanted to be sure that I followed him exactly.  
  
As we went through, I saw shines on the muck-covered floor. Bits of metal, some gleaming and new and others rusted and crumbling were sprinkled across the stones, and in some cases I could see little triggers and spikes. How many traps were there that I couldn’t see? If I strayed from his footsteps, would it just be a foot that I lost? How many potions would it take to clear myself of inevitable infection from those filthy edges?  
  
Out of the chamber, we came to another corridor that was flooded with repulsive opaque waters. The sight made me groan until Thrynn turned around hoisted me into his arms, and waded in over his knees.  
  
“You live in this?” I asked. The pity in my voice must have been too thick—for a moment I was certain that his hold on me loosened and my body dipped closer to the quagmire.  
  
“It’s not so bad, where we’re set up. You’ll see,” he answered gruffly.  
  
“Are you happier here?” I ventured, and felt his grip return. “Happier than being a bandit?”  
  
“It’s the same in a lot of ways. Different in others,” Thrynn said. “All in all, this is better. Hard to call it ‘happier,’ but it’s better.”  
  
“I’m glad,” I said, looking down into the ripples as he stirred them to life with every labored step. “You were a pretty bad bandit to just let me live. You even gave me bread. I doubt that’s common behavior for any kind of criminal.”  
  
It didn’t seem as though he was going to acknowledge that, and it was only after a substantial silence that he finally said, “No. It was stupid of you to be wandering up to a ruined city, but I wasn’t about to kill you for it. And I knew too well what the others would have done to you if I captured you alive.”  
  
A shiver went down my spine at the thought. I’d begged him to let me in, and he hadn’t entertained the idea for an instant. At the time I was desperate for shelter, and would have gone right in if he’d allowed it. Between him keeping my presence secret and preventing me from revealing myself, he saved my life that night—and that’s not even to mention the food he gave me, or the directions to Riverwood, or his instructions to ensure that the town blacksmith Alvor would take me in. I owed Thrynn my life and more.  
  
And here he was, carrying me through a river of sewage. I would be indebted to him forever.  
  
We’d made our way out of the flooded tunnel and wound through the shadows. Thrynn’s steps were confident, even when the torches burned low or not at all. He seemed to know everywhere a homeless wretch slept, or a family of skeevers was nested, or where the less-friendly denizens of the sewers resided, and carefully avoided anything that might have spelled trouble. He seemed to have forgotten that he was carrying me, since he kept me in his arms the rest of the way.  
  
I wasn’t complaining, of course. As far as my eyes could see, there was danger in every sliver of darkness and every whisper of voices made me cringe closer to my protector.  
  
Surprisingly, the smell began to lift the further we got. Eventually it seemed that we were delving into an abandoned part of the sewer. No longer was it filled with waste and filth—this part of the undercity was too dilapidated and ancient to even be used for that.  
  
A dry, bright stone room marked the end of our journey, and only then did Thrynn set me down on my feet. He indicated just one more stretch of absolute darkness too narrow for him to carry me through and gave a solemn nod.  
  
That was our destination. Despite him prodding me forward, I slipped my hand into his one more time. The uncertainty in my eyes and the lick of my lips must have been enough for him. He showed no hint of frustration, and led me that last little way by the hand.  
  
Across a wide man-built cavern, on the other side of a twinkling lake of unexpectedly clean water, I saw… a bar.  
  
Yes, a bar, at the deepest depths of Riften’s sewers, the very core and heart of the city. An imposing figure stood between us and the bridge to the open tavern, but a sarcastic salute from Thrynn made his step back just enough for me to inch my way past him, his glare on me all the while.  
  
People sat around several tables scattered about the floor. One man ran the bar and poured a weak-looking ale for the patrons. A few people glanced our way, but most of the thieves were too invested in their various card and dice games, bickering, or boasting to take much notice of me. One man strummed on a lute, and wasn’t doing half-bad, but was constantly heckled by many of his brethren who berated him and threatened violence should he play “that same damn song for the dozenth time, damnit!”  
  
“Ah, and this is our girl,” I heard a familiar melodic voice pipe up. Thrynn led me to a table where a woman with snow-white hair, a bald Breton man, and Brynjolf all sat, peering up at me with differing shades of optimism. Brynjolf, of course, looked pleased that I’d shown up, while the Breton seemed intrigued, and the Imperial might just spit on me any given moment. “Have a seat, lass. We’ll get you up to speed.”  
  
I sat myself between Brynjolf and the Breton, and Thrynn took up the space right behind me so that he stood over my shoulders. I couldn’t tell if he was there to protect me, or to act as some sort of security.  
  
“You’ve never done anything dishonest for any amount of coin, have you? And you’re running a little light in the pockets, lass. I knew it before you said a word back in the alley. It’s all about sizing up your mark. The way they walk, what they’re wearing; it’s all a dead giveaway. And if you think the average shmuck off the street is easy for me to see through, you can’t even imagine what an open book you are. Now, you’re about as innocent as the poor rabbit around your shoulders,” he said, pointing to Anoriath’s stole. “You didn’t guess a thing when the guard attempted a shakedown—you trust authority. And you walked right in here without so much as a backward glance—you’ll trust damn near _anyone_. The dress you’re wearing is old and worn in places that don’t match up with your joints. This was given to you from someone much taller, after she was done with it. Charity. That rabbit was caught by a damn good shot. White as snow. Must have been shot in the middle of a blizzard. You didn’t catch it, but you keep it close. Sentimental. It was a gift. That cloak is made of tundra cotton and patched with the burlap found in farms, and is stained dark at the bottom like the farmland soil near Whiterun Hold. Belonged to a farmer, right? And since you don’t have any callouses, that farmer wouldn’t be you. But you do have a satchel, like apothecaries like to wear. It’s older than you are, though, just look at the cracks in that leather, and the Cyrodiilic designs stamped into the hide. It must have belonged to your mother, yeah? She taught you the household remedies, and you followed the way of the alchemist like a religion. Nothing on you is your own.”  
  
He leaned forward. I leaned back. He was done just picking apart my outfit. Now he was looking at me, all of me, making me feel naked under his gaze. With a glance to Thrynn, I realized quickly that I wouldn’t be rescued by the former bandit.  
  
“You’re skinny. Not built thin—you just aren’t fed enough to keep your curves where they belong. You don’t see money often, do you? And you would rather starve than suffer the nagging of your conscience for stealing a loaf of bread. You’re a child, lass, not yet come to the realization that the rules are self-inflicted.”  
  
“You sound confident,” I said, trying to keep some amount of pride in my voice. But he was right, and it made me shrink into my seat against my will.   
  
The Breton gave a knowing little smirk, and the Imperial rolled her eyes.   
  
“It’s all about sizing up your mark, lass,” he said again. “It’s one of the many things that I am the best at. You’re a sweet girl, covered from head to toe with mementos, devoted to someone else’s cause. I know you better than you think. And I know exactly how to get you what you want, including all the things you didn’t even know you needed.”  
  
“I just need money,” I interjected, “that’s all.”  
  
“Oh, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. You’ll be getting money and more. Just wait until you get a taste, and I think we’ll have a very good relationship going.”  
  
“I’m not a criminal,” I argued. “What do you have in mind that could be so good?”  
  
“Just a few errands that we need extra hands in. That’s all. You won’t be doing anything wrong, or hurting anyone. You’ll be keeping people from getting hurt at all.” He waved a cordial hand to his associates. “This is Vex, and this is Delvin. They’ll be telling you where to go and what to do.”  
  
“But I’m not part of the guild?”  
  
The woman, Vex, gave a cold, hard laugh at the very suggestion. “You wouldn’t last a day in the thick of it, and we’re not stupid enough to let you botch these jobs by sending you in over a trained burglar. The only way this place is going to return to its glory days is if we can finish these extra jobs and get the gold flowing again, and ever since the guild’s luck turned sour, we haven’t had a coin to our name. If a new angle will turn things around we’re willing to try.” She gave Brynjolf a threatening curl of her lips as if she was ready to bite his nose off. “I guess we’re just that desperate.”  
  
With a deep breath, I lowered my head. “I know all about desperation. It’s better than hopelessness. When do I start?”


	12. In Which She Falls Into a Canal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Since arriving in Riften, the Thieves Guild is making good use of Brina in various jobs. This money will be spent paying off her brother's bounty, but there's more to be gained from her time in the Ratway than just gold, and little Brina is once again exercising her talent to find friends in the strangest of places.

### Chapter Twelve

The rooftop of the Black-Briar mansion gave our company an exceptional view of the entirety of Dryside. As an added bonus, the residents wouldn’t wonder about the occasional noise or bump coming from above.  
  
Illusion was far from my area of expertise, but at Brynjolf’s behest and Vex’s expectations, I’d practiced a couple of little tricks that would make the night go far easier for the little team I was working with.  
  
Niruin sat beside me, his legs dangling over the edge of the steep wooden roof idly as we all watched the marked house together. Thrynn was leaning against the Black-Briar’s chimney, bickering with Sapphire about who would take what route and what position she would take.  
  
My eyes were locked on the manor we—they, I mean—were about to burglarize. The windows, the doors, all flew open in my mind, and with more and more I pulled at my internal reserves of magicka, I saw those portals filled lights. Searching, searching, my magical call was answered when a blue line traced itself down the side of the house and into the manor through a second-story window, and then wound its way through the halls to come to an abrupt stop at the far end of the mansion.  
  
No one else saw any of this, of course. That was why they had me, a mage, doing this parlor trick for them.  
  
“Second floor. It’s in the northeast corner of the house, what looks like… a bedroom, I would say. But don’t go through the ground level. Something blocked that way. Must be a lock we don’t have the means to open quietly.” As I spoke, I set out my own arsenal: a row of glass vials filled with differing shades of blue liquids. I downed my first one like a shot of liquor and swore that my cut had better make it worth drinking these over selling them.  
  
Not going through the ground floor was nothing to this lot. As soon as the words left me, Niruin was finishing a knot on a grappling hook and preparing to swing, pausing only long enough for me to put a light muffling enchantment over the hook.  
  
“All this magic is making this too easy,” Sapphire complained.  
  
“Considering our luck recently, too easy is exactly what we need,” Thrynn grunted, taking a place behind Niruin. “Easy means harder to fuck up. Think of it that way.”  
  
I enacted another spell, one that was often ignored in my repertoire, one that would have drained me completely if not for my stream of continually recovering magicka courtesy of my first potion. “People in beds on the second floor, one of them being in the same room as the mark. Two people in what I would think is the room beside that one. A third person sleeping on the other end of the house. Downstairs, someone is sitting toward the back of the house.” Their silhouettes shone in soft, blurry shapes, identifying them as the type who wouldn’t care to wake up to a host of thieves crawling around their halls. Not that I needed a life detection spell to know that my friends wouldn’t be welcome guests in this particular home.  
  
“They won’t know a thing,” Sapphire purred confidently.   
  
The elf let the hook fly and arced it over the street in a graceful swing, catching firmly on the other house’s chimney. Thrynn set about tying off the other side, and Niruin was off, sliding across the line with only guild leather gloves between himself and a catastrophic case of rope burn. As he went, I cast a muffling spell on him as well, then on Sapphire and Thrynn as they each went down the line in turn.  
  
As they came to the other side, Niruin detached his end of the line and I hurriedly pulled it back and signaled to the window my clairvoyance spell had indicated as the easiest point of entry. Sapphire went to the edge of the roof and flipped down, Thrynn taking her legs to keep her from dropping, and quickly pulled the glass wide open and crawled inside. Swinging down from the roof and into the open window, Thrynn and the Bosmer were right on her heels.  
  
And then, I was in silence, alone, left to watch just the exterior of the house and hope nothing went wrong. I focused on detecting any life within the walls, watching the faint blue figures of the guildmates lurk through the upper story, following the directions I had given.  
  
I wish I knew what happened. The three figures stopped dead in their tracks and held very still while the red form downstairs stood and started, I guessed, toward the stairs.  
  
And that was my cue. A ball of ice formed in my hand and shot itself to a window on the first floor. The red blob of a person turned around and pursued my distraction, investigating the room while the thieves hurried along. One blue figure stayed behind, probably acting as a sentry, while the other two worked together to open the door. One thief went alone, right to where the clairvoyance had told me, and then they all moved in tandem with the other, bounding for the closest window. I could now clearly see Sapphire at the front of the group through the glass in the window as she pushed the portal open and dove haphazardly down to the ground, throwing caution to the wind. Right behind her, the others dropped down and rolled with the fall, Niruin clutching a dark bundle in his arms.  
  
They ran, leaving me to finish up. I gathered their supplies, including Niruin’s grappling hook and rope, and ran over the rooftop with muffled feet to meet my companions down in the yard behind the Black-Briar home.  
  
When I’d slowly shimmied my way down from the roof (my poor leg would never fully recover from my frequent abuse, and I knew from experience how badly a two-story leap could hurt, thank you very much), I was with them holding out dimly glowing hands. “I saw your ankle twist on that fall, Saphhire. Don’t pretend. You’ll only do more damage walking it off,” I said patiently, the way Danica used to chide me for pretending to be in less pain than I was. With only minor fuss, she allowed me to heal her sprain while Niruin and Thrynn patted each other on the back.  
  
“Couldn’t resist, could you? You made the whole damn house creak, but you couldn’t say no!” Thrynn taunted.  
  
“A bottle of Surilie Brothers wine, just sitting out in the open on a table!” Niruin crowed. He showed off the dark object I saw him fall with, revealing it to be a large, gleaming bottle of a swirling liquid. “It would have been a bigger crime to just leave it there!”  
  
“But we got what we need, right?” I asked.  
  
Sapphire lifted her own prize, a sparkly golden necklace sporting an ostentatious pendent laden with gemstones. “Oh, yes, we got it!”  
  
Our celebration was cut short by a voice calling over the fence, “Who’s out here? Show yourself!”  
  
“Damn!”—“Shit!”—“Fuck!”—“Mara!”  
  
While I had some incriminating evidence on me, I didn’t have any stolen goods to show for it. If anyone would get in the least trouble, it was certainly going to be me. So I hissed, “Run, just run!”  
  
The thieves didn’t need to be told twice. In fact, they didn’t need to be told once. Before I’d said a word, both Sapphire and Niriun had darted in opposite directions, and only Thrynn had paused at all. They were scattering like roaches while I tried to figure out the best course of action. The guard was quickly rounding the yard toward the fence, and unlike my acrobatic friends, I couldn’t just hop over a fence like a deer. Bringing flames to life in my hands, I shot at a patch of grass directly in front of the gate, stalling the guard and making him panic while the magical fire flickered in its confined burn radius. It gave me barely enough time to get to a fence and begin clawing my way over.  
  
I was slow enough that the guard saw what I was up to and abandoned the prospect of nabbing me in the yard. He continued around the fence and was right on my tracks when I finally toppled over the spiky fence.  
  
Luckily, the Black-Briar home was right on the edge of Dryside. I had known it would come to this the moment I first saw the drop over the bridge. But I lacked the stamina to keep on running, and I knew very well that the guard was just a stretch of his arms away from capturing me.  
  
This was going to ruin the lavender left in my satchel, damn it.  
  
Vaulting over the balustrade could have been more graceful, but seeing as I am no real physical specimen, I would forgive myself. It must have looked more like a suicide attempt to the guard than a dive for escape, since I all but crashed into the railing before rolling over the top of it head-over-heels.  
  
Falling into the waterway below could not have been less graceful, on the other hand. The splash could have been enough to wake everyone living along the canal since I landed laying straight, mostly on my side and flailing like a troll on fire.  
  
When I managed to surface, weighed down by my boots and cloak and dress, I heard what might have been dozens of armored boots making a dreadful racket down the stairs to the canal. It was probably just the horrible echo between the water and the stone walls encapsulating the waterway, but to me, it sounded like the whole damn army was searching for me. With some effort, I managed to flounder over to the wooden walkways that hugged the wall and found an area where I could hide underneath with just enough air above me to keep from drowning.  
  
For several long, uncomfortable minutes I hung against the walkway, my lips between the wooden planks for air, while a couple of guard (from this position I could count only two) went along the canal, lifting torches to the water and calling out. I don’t know how long it lasted, but when they finally clamored back up to the main level of town, my arms ached from holding myself up and my lungs burned from the shallow breaths I’d been taking through the wood. Not to mention I was completely drenched.  
  
I stumbled into the Ragged Flagon, soaked to the core so that even my unruly hair fell flat against my face, shivering like a drowned skeever. Everyone paused in what they were doing, lowered their drinks, dropped their cards against their tables, and held their loaded dice still while everyone at once took me in. Thrynn, Niruin, and Sapphire were all among the crowd, sitting as if they’d already been there for some time.  
  
After a piercing silence had filled the entire cavern, I was assaulted with roars of laughter and a chorus of shouts, “Go get Vipir!! Get Vipir _now_!!”  
  
And, true to their word, no one was happier to see me walk in in the state I was in than Vipir the Fleet. “Finally they can let me off the hook!” Vipir laughed. “So, what will you be? Brina the Drowned? Brina the Aquatic?”  
  
“This same thing happened to you?” I asked, wringing Suvaris’s dress over the ledge of the bar and into the water.  
  
“Not quite. But my entrance was just the same. Maybe they’ll just give you my title, and you can be Brina the Fleet. Oh, no, don’t look like that! I would be honored! Besides, I have some much better names in mind for myself. What do you think of Vipir the Extraordinary? Vipir the Handsome? Vipir the Heart-Stealer? I’m fond of that last one myself. Have you heard yet about the night I bedded four women at once?” He gave a lift of his brows. “Imagine what I could do devoting all my attention to a single lady!”  
  
“If your name is any indication, Vipir the _Fleet_ , probably not a whole lot for very long.” I thought it was very clever, but the way Sapphire burst into cruel laughter and the dark look that Vipir shot her told me my analysis was far from unique.  
  
“This is what I get for hanging around thieves guild women,” he hissed bitterly.  
  
“I’m not in the guild,” I reminded him. “Just a passing stranger. So it sounds like the common denominator in how women respond to you is, well, you.”  
  
“Charming as a histcarp, that’s what you are,” Vipir grumbled, leaving me to dry by the water while he got himself a fresh mug of ale.  
  
“Just so you know,” a woman’s voice said from behind me (people just love to sneak up behind me, I’m sure), “not being ‘in the guild’ doesn’t make you any less… Well, in the guild.” It was Tonilia, the bartender’s lady and the guild’s main fence. She was an average-looking Redguard woman, and if she hadn’t worn the supple leather that was commonplace among the guild members, she would have looked just as out of place as me. That said, she was about as well-respected as Brynjolf or anyone else. After all, what good was stealing if there was no one to pass the goods off to?  
  
I smiled at her gratefully, but took her words with a grain of salt. “I’m really not, though. Officially or otherwise. I’ll only be around until I make enough money to clear my brother’s bounty and call of the bounty hunter going after him.”  
  
“Are you sure?” she asked, sitting casually on a crate beside me. “Because you may not be a thief, but that was the first successful burglary we’ve had in a while. Our luck has been beyond bad, and Delvin’s gone as far to say that the whole guild is cursed.”  
  
“It was just one success,” I said. “Just one necklace.”  
  
“Just one is more than we’ve had. I’m just saying, if you turn things around, the people in charge will do what it takes to keep you on board. We need it. I suggest you get some confidence and make a list of demands, because before long, Brynjolf might just try and buy you into the fold.”  
  
I must have looked as incredulous as I felt. “Really? They do that?”  
  
“If they think that the profit of having you will be more in the long run, sure,” Tonilia said. “But he’s not just going to let a good asset walk away. Not after his last protégé went off without a word to anyone.”  
  
I should have ignored the way my intuition piqued at the phrase, but it sounded too familiar. “Just left? He was in the middle of something important, and just left?”  
  
“Yeah. Every other job he did went flawlessly. We thought we really had someone in it for life. Then, when he’s sent to Solitude to get some information, we find out he’s been chased out of town by the guards for murdering the emperor’s cousin! We don’t know if he even got to do the job Mercer sent him for, but he can’t very well get into Solitude now that he’s the most wanted man that side of Skyrim. Say, what’s the matter?”  
  
By this point in her explanation, I had turned around and was leaning over the little dock, clutching my belly. “I think I’m going to be sick…!”  
  
It wasn’t a lie. And, while most of the patrons were very much used to seeing people lose the contents of their stomachs, I heard at least one voice shout, “Damn it, Vipir, what did you do to Brina?!”  
  
“Fuck you, I’m all the way over here!”  
  
Three more voices answered, “Damn it, Vipir!”  
  
  
_27th of First Seed  
Dear Big Brother,  
I don’t know whether to be disgusted in you for the route your life has taken, or myself for not guessing. Sometimes, I swear you’re the worst thing in the whole world. I think going after you is the biggest mistake of my life, and I think I would rather just go home to Kvatch all by myself and just beg the count to let me live on the old farm without you. Was joining the Thieves Guild more important than protecting the lives of every woman in Windhelm by stopping the Butcher? Was it more important than your duties to the people of Whiterun as their thane? Was it more important than saving the world from the dragons?  
  
I get so mad that I want to cry. But then I remember seeing your face when you got home after months off on adventure, following your defection from the Imperial Legion. We were all shocked with you for abandoning your responsibilities as a soldier, for just disappearing from your camp, but that huge smile on your face told us all that you would do it again in a heartbeat. In the end, you went on adventures wilder than the army would ever have taken you on, and you came back with wealth and glory, and even an official pardon for your criminal defection. Is this just the same? Just you straying from your destiny because you know you can, because you’ve done it before?  
  
I don’t hate you, Brother. In fact, the more I write, and the more I remember your face, your huge smile, your mismatched armor that you’d found along the way when you walked back into the house for the first time in forever, I know I can only be as mad at you now as I was then.  
  
No matter what, you’re still a hero. I believe that, I really do. And you’re going to save the world. I know you will. I just have to remind myself that your life is different. Your destiny is far more complex and important than mine will ever be, and I simply must forgive you.  
  
Besides, how unfair would it be of me to judge you for being in the guild when here I am, living among them and helping them myself?_  
  
  
While my position as ‘part of the guild’ didn’t seem up for debate other than what Tonilia had told me, I was allowed into the sanctum to sleep, bless them! The beds weren’t the best, reflecting the state of the guild’s coffers, but it was a bed, and that was a lot better than the box I’d nodded off on the night before in the Flagon.  
  
If the Ragged Flagon’s existence had surprised me, the cistern was an even more amazing. The enormous man-made cavern housed all of the guild members, a massive vault no one was allowed into, a training room, and all the space the sewer-dwelling criminals could ask for. How this place wasn’t common knowledge to everyone was beyond me, but for now it was a place to stay while I made money for Big Brother’s bounty.  
  
Why was I still going to pay it? He may not be a murderer, and I still didn’t believe that he had it in him to be such a monster, but he was indisputably a thief and guilty of other crimes. Not only that, but his wealth was well-known. He could pay his own bounty without feeling the sting of poverty.  
  
I told myself the same justification over and over: I said that I would, and I told Olev I would pay him to keep him off Brother’s back, and regardless of what Brother did or didn’t do, he had much more important things to worry about than a bounty. But the idea of making so much money, of working so hard, just to send the fruits of my labors away for his benefit sounded worse and worse every time I thought about it.  
  
It was a self-inflicted responsibility, and I would see it through.  
  
The hideout was fascinating. When not out trying to loot or pillage, the thieves sat around, mostly, drinking or talking or gambling.  Sometimes they made it around to the training room, or shot at the targets set up around the cistern, but for the most part life was amazingly relaxed. I suppose it made sense, when their work was so stressful. No matter how much a person loves what they do, when their job constantly hangs in a life-or-death balance and adrenaline courses through them as thick as blood, lazy downtime must be necessary to keep from sudden heart attacks on the job.  
  
My time had been spent similarly lounging about with them, until Cynric made a passing comment about a courier being in town, on his way westward.  
  
I scrambled to Elgrim’s Elixirs and found that Ingun was there, crushing some nightshade into a sticky paste. “Are you mixing it with beehive husk?” I said instead of a proper greeting.  
  
Luckily, Ingun really was just as enthralled with alchemy as me, and didn’t take the lapse in etiquette as an insult at all. “Oh, no. I’m going to combine it with some deathbell that I’ve already pulverized and salted.”  
  
“Why?” I asked, amazed. My gasp brought a proud smile to Ingun’s pretty face. “That would be disastrous!”  
  
“It’s supposed to be,” she pointed out blandly. “I find it absolutely fascinating, watching the eyes go blind, the heart stop beating. The body is so fragile, so imperfect, and my poisons show that. It’s poetic, don’t you think?”  
  
Oh, Lady Mara, this woman was going to buy my potions and purify them not into beneficial potions, but poisons. For a moment I wanted to go back on our deal. Then I remembered how much money she offered me.  
  
None the less, I couldn’t help but speak the self-righteous script that was immediately scrawling itself across my brain. “That doesn’t really show the skill of an alchemist, though. It doesn’t take anything to harm or kill a person at all—I can get sick from mead, or just a chill in the air. I drink something that slows me down and makes me sick every night. Mead. Now, to go against that delicate nature by giving people strength that they wouldn’t otherwise have—that shows the real power of alchemy. Defying natural limitations with something as simple as a sip of nectar is the real poetry.”  
  
While we couldn’t disagree more, clearly, about what the real measure of a talented alchemist was, the conversation lasted for over two hours until I finally remembered why I had come in the first place.  
  
“Eight thousand for all of them,” Ingun said as soon as I brought the transaction up. Before I could make any comment on the shocking offer, and apparently misreading my look of surprise, she gave an almost-apologetic smile. “I’m a Black-Briar. I was raised to know exactly what I want, and never to negotiate when I have the upper hand. You need the money, don’t you? So eight thousand, and I refuse to go any higher.”  
  
Actually, I was tempted to say, I expected at least a thousand less. But as long as she thought she was being a shrewd business woman, I wouldn’t give her a reason to drive the price down. I nodded dumbly, emptying my satchel onto Elgrim’s counter for her to count and inspect. She then directed me back to the Black-Briar house with a note bearing her signature and instructions for someone named Maul to pass along the coin.  
  
I suppose, since I’d never seen that amount of money ever in my whole life, it didn’t occur to me how heavy all the gold would be. Maul, a great big Nord with a short nose and persistent glower, intercepted me in front of the manor and rolled his eyes at the letter. “Are you sure you want coin? You don’t look like you can manage carrying five hundred pounds worth of gold.”  
  
Ah. I hadn’t even thought of that, silly oversight as it was. How was I going to lug around eight thousand Septims? Maybe my perpetual poorness made me believe gold was some magical substance that didn’t weigh anything. I blushed furiously at myself, stammering over my words as I tried to work out some sort of solution.  
  
“Would gemstones work?” Maul growled impatiently.  
  
“Ah—um, yes! Sure.”  
  
He disappeared into the manor, warning me not to follow him inside, and returned promptly with a discreet calfskin bag.  
  
I opened it up, and lost my breath to the radiance of the glimmering bits inside. They looked like little bits of stained glass, cut perfectly so that even in the darkness of the bag they seemed to shine brilliantly.  
  
“Don’t make a show of it, idiot. Just get out of here before someone gets curious and decides to take a closer look.”  
  
This man wasn’t the type of person I wanted to disobey, so I scooted out of sight with a squeak of farewell and thank you. As promised, a man who didn’t quite fit in stood up at the top of Dryside, in front of the steps to Mistveil keep. Despite his plain clothes, he seemed to stand with purpose. “Are you the courier passing through? You’re going west, toward Solitude, right?” I asked.  
  
He looked me up and down, and then flashed a disarming grin. “I can go anywhere you need, miss, for the right price,” he answered after a thought.  
  
“Perfect! I actually need you to deliver to a few places. I have some gems here… I need five thousand Septims worth brought to Solitude paid to the jarl to absolve my brother from his bounty, and then the rest that’s left after your fee brought to a man named Olev. As far as I know, he’s in Shor’s Stone. There are eight thousand Septims worth in here, so taking out your price and the five thousand that must make it to Solitude, how much will be going to Olev? I just need to know, because I’ll still owe him after this.” I was met by a blank stare, so I continued slowly, “Does that… make sense? Five thousand to Solitude—“  
  
“No, no, it makes perfect sense!” the courier said hurriedly, taking the bag from me. “You know, since I can tell this is important, don’t worry about the fee! I’ll just take care of everything. I’m on my way out there anyways. Good bye!” He darted off before I could thank him, leaving me to marvel at the astounding work ethic of these couriers.  
  
It was with eight thousand Septims less of worries that I practically skipped down to the cistern.  
  
“In a good mood, Brina?” Rune asked when I entered.  
  
Pleased as a springtime afternoon, I told him of my temporary fortune and the relief I felt at my brother’s bounty being paid.  
  
“You just handed eight thousand Septims to a man standing by the keep? And he was kind enough to waive the fee for a trip across Skyrim?” Cynric asked in a worryingly low voice.  
  
“Isn’t that the courier you mentioned before?” I asked.  
  
“Would anyone in their right mind not charge someone for transporting eight thousand gold worth of precious gems across the province? Or does it seem more likely that someone would pretend to be a courier so that they could run off with enough money to buy a house and fill it with mead barrels?” Cynric said.  
  
For a moment, everyone looked at me with different shades of exasperation, frustration, and pity. Then, as it dawned on me and I tried to whirl around in a no-doubt futile attempt to chase the “courier” down, I was cut off by a flurry of thieves who all rushed past me, out of the hideout and into the wilds of Riften.  
  
I wondered if the thieves guild had ever embarked on a manhunt for a thief before. It seemed ridiculous that they were going after their own kind for their own sort of behavior, but, as Rune pointed out to me while he helped me up through the narrow shaft out of the cistern that would lead us to the graveyard of Riften, this wasn’t thieves just hunting thieves. “It’s not his thievery that we’re against. It’s his choice in victims, and the fact that he’s stealing on our turf. It takes a certain kind of fool to steal from someone with the thieves guild, especially right in our city of operation.”  
  
We combed the streets, crossing paths with guildmates every now and again to exchange notes and discuss where we’d been. The sun was setting when Sapphire came down the alley Rune and I were walking through with a sinister smirk painted on her wicked face.  
  
“You’re damn lucky. He only squandered a little bit of that fortune of yours on skooma when Thrynn found him,” she purred.  
  
“Thrynn found him?!” I exclaimed. “Oh, thank the Eight and Talos! Where are they?”  
  
Sapphire’s smirk widened into a feline smile, and she shook her head. “You’ve got a weak stomach, right? You probably don’t want to see what Thrynn did to the guy. Just go back to the Flagon and the rest of us will meet you there.”  
  
“What did he do?” I asked stupidly. I don’t know why I asked. I didn’t want to know the answer.  
  
“You know how he gave you that line about cutting out your tongue when you first came to Riften? Well, things like that aren’t always bluffs, especially when dealing with someone who used to be a highwayman.”  
  
Obediently, I went to the Flagon to wait, that image and all of the possibilities swimming in my mind morbidly. Not only did I have that to feel faint over, I was given a ribbing by Vex and Delvin not to trust so easily. “Not that your naiveté isn’t cute and all,” Delvin chuckled into his ale, “but this won’t be the last time someone takes advantage of you if you don’t learn some street smarts. And there are a lot of ways people can take advantage and hurt a girl like you. You’re lucky wealth was all you lost.”  
  
“If you lost more, maybe you’d actually learn a lesson,” Vex sneered.  
  
“Maybe you’re just subject to the same curse as the rest of the guild now,” Delvin sighed.  
  
“I thought I wasn’t part of the guild, really,” I said.  
  
“Technically, no,” Delvin said with a dismissive shrug. “Usually, it’s at least run by the guildmaster to recruit someone new, and we don’t really have the funds to finance a new thief, with all that entails. But for all intents and purposes…” He gave another shrug.  
  
“You’re allowed in the hideout and have a bed in the cistern. Consider yourself an honorary member,” Vex said. “Pull your weight, keep up the successful heists like last night, and don’t make any more stupid mistakes like today, and you might just be worth the guild armor.”  
  
I knew I should have felt ashamed of myself for cavorting with criminals and being (to some degree) accepted into their fold, but somehow an honored smile crept its way onto my face.  
  
Similarly, I knew I should have been distraught at the blood of Thrynn’s knuckles when he walked into the Ragged Flagon with several others in tow, but instead of reprimanding him for his violence, I wrapped my arms over his shoulders and thanked him for saving my brother’s bounty. This was like before, on my way to Windhelm when I’d killed that bandit, I thought. If he didn’t want something bad to happen, he should have been a good citizen to begin with. There was no sense in beating myself or Thrynn up over someone else’s decisions that we’d simply been forced to respond to.  I steeled that lesson once again over my heart, and let go of the slight pang of guilt my conscience had been nursing.  
  
“So, what’s the finder’s fee?” I asked. I knew the way things worked around here already.  
  
Thrynn gave an innocent blink that immediately melted away to reveal a roguish grin. “No fee. Just a good deed that I’d like you to remember one day.”  
  
“He’s worse than Vipir,” I heard Sapphire tease. “Vipir lets you know exactly what he’s up to, but Thrynn makes his intentions seem perfectly benign. Do yourself a favor, and don’t get tricked twice in one day.”  
  
Despite the warning, one which Thrynn did not refute, I didn’t feel uncomfortable joining the group for their night of mischief in the tavern. I had a tankard of Vekel’s horrible ale. (I would have loved to brew something the guild could be proud of. Brynjolf would be able to come up with a witty name for the brew and everything!) On one side of me, Niruin snuck cards under the table to Vipir on my other side, who played against Tonilia and Dirge across the table.  
  
Others participated, but it was hard to take the game very seriously with four Vehk cards already in play. Surely they all knew that they were cheating, and no proper deck had four of the same card like that! No one seemed to mind, and I realized quickly that this game was played differently than I’d been taught in Cyrodiil, or the proper traditional way I saw played in the New Gnisis Cornerclub, in more ways than I could make sense of.  
  
Three nonsensical hands later and Vipir was offering to pay for my next drink with his inexplicably-won profits. I didn’t even need to say yes, please; he was off to the bar with or without my approval, and a new drink was set in front of me.  
  
I was sipping it happily, watching as Delvin and Brynjolf whispered something to one another at another table. It was business related by the way they leaned in and the serious set of their eyes, but smiles still played on their lips. This was a night of celebration for last night’s successful burglary, and represented a new ray of hope that maybe the lot wasn’t as cursed as previously thought.  
  
After a while of watching the different groups mingling and chatting, I noticed Thrynn approach Delvin, whisper something into his ear, and walk away. The Breton gave a chuckle and a wave of his hand when Brynjolf leaned back in his chair and said something through a tight jaw. I wondered if Brynjolf would be proud of me for trying out what he’d told me about, this sizing people up and taking their posture and actions apart thing. It was fun, though I felt like all of my conjectures were painfully inaccurate. Oh, well. It was just practice, I told myself as I tried to discern what I was seeing.  
  
Some prideful part of me wanted them to be talking about me, though I knew how vain and unrealistic that was. This was an exciting time for the guild, and my involvement was the least of their concerns.  
  
I moved to the bar, holding my almost-empty tankard while I considered how much attention I’d gotten from the men of the guild, and how normal it seemed to be for all of the ladies to turn them down every time.  Their interest was just part of being a lady in the undercity. Still, I could hear Arcadia’s voice scolding me, telling me to watch how much ale I drink and to take care what men I get close to. It was sound advice in a situation like this. I couldn’t tell how personally any one man might take it if I got too close to another one by some drunken accident, especially since the accepted course of action universally followed by the guild women was to coldly deny all advances.  
  
Drunken accidents… the taste of ale and the sounds of laughter brought me back to the party in Whiterun, to dancing under the Gildergreen with the big Companion with the wolf-like grin, to waking up with Anoriath and Elrindir, to spinning and spinning under the stars with people who loved me, to the strange Breton man—  
  
“You really know how to find the best parties!”  
  
Beside me at the bar was a man I thought I’d never see again. In fact, if someone had told me that he was a drunken fantasy to begin with, I’d sooner believe that than the reality of the mysterious stranger.  
  
He wore the same black robes as he had at the party, his hair still long and soft and neatly parted, and the exact same scent of heady wine and musty ale on his breath.  
  
“You!” I gasped.  
  
“Yeah, it’s me. Don’t you worry, sweetheart, I’m just here for a drink. Go play and we’ll catch up later,” the Breton slurred.  
  
“Later?” I wanted to question him further, or to at least ask how he had gotten here or what his name was, but his dismissal seemed to physically turn me around from him against my will.  
  
Standing immediately in front of me now was Brynjolf himself. He set one hand down on my shoulder and led me to a table, sitting me down with a lopsided smile. On closer inspection, there were indeed two faint scars on one side. Maybe the sideways quality of his expression was a subconscious response to that marring, or maybe the way he smiled combined with his relaxed scruff was deliberate, meant to minimize attention on those lines to make himself appear less… well, less like the kind of man who would get scars on his face. Certainly noticing those lines made him look immediately more like a dashing rogue than a trustworthy salesman. He was an expert conman, that was certain. He had a drink in his hand, but wasn’t drinking it. Red hair swept back from his face, exposing his whole face so that he looked honest and open, but his dark eyes smiled with an air of adventure. He must have been birds of a feather with my brother. No wonder Big Brother was the famous ‘protégé.’  
  
“Sizing me up, lass?” he whispered warmly. He winked in good humor. “Don’t think too hard, now, some of us really are just as simple we seem.”  
  
“There are a lot of words I would use to describe you, but never simple,” I said. “Did you want to talk to me?”  
  
“You and your brother both have made waves. Your job last night went brilliantly, and your brother was able to complete every mission that came his way smooth as glass. Now, your brother is mixed up in other things that conflict with our work on many, many levels. But if you can match his success, I don’t see any reason not to make you a full member of the guild.” He held a pause until I leaned across the table toward him. “Mercer doesn’t agree. What he says goes, of course, but I’m trying to turn him around. A few more stellar jobs, though, and I think even Mercer himself will have to change his mind. What do you say? Are you still in?”  
  
“I need the money, so I’ll be here until I have all Brother’s debts paid,” I answered carefully. “I’ll stay for that, but then I will need to move on. I can’t stay here forever.”  
  
“And why not?” Brynjolf asked bluntly. “You’re what we need. And you, lass, need to claim your own fate.”  
  
I didn’t realize how far I was leaning across the table until a third presence joined us. “And what would Mercer say if he heard you going on about this after he told you no?” Delvin asked, flicking his ankles up onto the table to pull me back into my chair. I followed Delvin’s eyes as he glanced over my shoulder, and saw that Thrynn received the look from another table and gave the Breton a stiff nod.  
  
Well, now I had an idea what he’d said to Delvin earlier. Maybe Arcadia was onto something after all. I really didn’t want to cause a rift or competition between guildmates.  
  
“It’s fine,” I answered for Brynjolf. “I’m flattered, but it’s just not in my future to be a thief. I have a home in Cyrodiil that I plan to go back to as soon as I get my brother back.”  
  
“Your brother will be coming back here eventually,” Brynjolf promised.  
  
“Be that as it may, there are other places I can look. And I’m not a thief. I appreciate everything you’re doing for me, and I’m happy to continue helping with these jobs as a supportive role, but I just couldn’t be a thief.”  
  
No one tried to argue with me anymore, and I was allowed to dismiss myself to wander back toward the bar.  
  
“Hoo! I was worried there!” the Breton stuttered drunkenly. He wrapped an arm over my shoulder, and his very touch made my whole body sway with a new wave of intoxication.  
  
“What do you mean?” I asked.  
  
“Oh, you know, cozying up to Daedra is bad news all around,” he answered matter-of-factly despite a disruptive case of hiccoughs. “Especially when one is the Ur-Daedra. No escaping that one.”  
  
“Daedra? What Daedra?”  
  
“Don’t worry your pretty little head sweetheart. I just had to stop in to make sure I wasn’t going to end up with any competition.”  
  
I couldn’t tell if he was purposefully talking in riddles, or if he was just too wasted to carry a conversation. “I’m sorry?”  
  
“You know, for your mortal soul. But really, don’t worry about it. How about another drink? This one’s on me!”  
  
A million reasons to be suspicious were flushed from my mind with the simple offer, drowned away with the rush of mead through me like falling down a deep, dark hole.


	13. In Which She Falls in Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One more job with the guild, and Brina will have enough to pay the last of that ten-thousand Septim debt. But she's getting more and more reasons to stay, no matter how much she tells herself the thieves guild isn't right for her. And, as she begins to cave in and accept her future with the guild, someone will try to guide Brina away before she's caught up in more than she can handle.

### Chapter Thirteen

No one talked about the night that they found me, unconscious, on the roof of the Benevolence of Mara. My heavy-drinking Breton friend Sam was as bad an influence as ever, but Brynjolf just chuckled while he helped me stumble down the steep roof and down into the graveyard below. I was just thankful that this time Sam hadn’t gotten me into bed with him and two other men like last time. That could have been disastrous.  
  
That wasn’t to say that being found on the roof of the temple wearing Sapphire’s set of guild armor wasn’t more than suspicious.  
  
In other news, Mercer wouldn’t budge on my status with the guild. He was always busy, the few times I’d glimpsed him, and never bothered to speak to me even in passing. As far as he was concerned, I wasn’t part of the guild in any way. Officially, that was still the verdict. I slept in the sanctum and helped with heists, but my position was still just the “passing-helper,” no matter how much Brynjolf tried to convince me to strive for more. Even if Mercer did give the word to initiate me into the guild, I would have refused. My home was Kvatch, through and through, and I would be leaving all of Skyrim behind once my brother was done saving the world. I couldn’t be settling down here with the thieves guild any more than I could have settled down by getting married in Whiterun.  
  
Not that I wasn’t thrilled with the custom bandolier that Tonilia fitted me with on Brynjolf’s order. True to her words days before, he was trying to buy me in, tempt me with tastes of the perks that awaited me if I only gave in. It was the black leather that the guild armor was made of, with several loops for convenient carrying of vials and commodities I would need right on-hand and secure pockets for other trinkets. It fit around my waist like my satchel, and had been tapered on the buckled end so that it could be secured underneath my satchel and their bands could overlap, giving me access to the storage of both at once. Some sort of subtle enchantment clung to the slick black hide, but I couldn’t determine just what spell had been put over it.  
  
When I wasn’t in the Ragged Flagon, I often crawled out of the sewers to the temple. The other mysterious Breton I’d met in Skyrim, the lovely red-haired lady in Kynesgrove, had told me that I should be a priest, and it didn’t feel wrong. Praying before the statues felt like the time I poured my heart out to her in the Braidwood Inn, like the images of the goddess were really watching and commiserating with me.   
  
Also, it helped to quiet my conscience when I dropped a few coins from the burglaries I participated in into the donation bowl. The priests’ approving smiles dimmed at the sight of my new black bandolier and with every time they caught me strolling out of the mausoleum. They also weren’t fond of the smell of mead and ale that often hung on me after drinking all night with my guildmates and hanging around the Flagon during the day.  
  
Time passed, and after what felt like just a few nights, I’d spent several weeks in Riften. Maramal said that Janan’s fiancé wouldn’t be coming to Riften to take her music box, and had suggested that I keep it in remembrance of her. While the two of us certainly weren’t close, it seemed that I might have been one of only a handful of people in Skyrim who even knew her name.  As depressing as the concept was, the little wooden box suddenly became deeply sentimental with that realization. With her in mind, the woman I hardly knew when I watched her get cut down by bandits, I plucked on the tines of the box in front of the temple, trying to figure out how to strum out a melody. I was plucking out a simple lullaby by the time the sun went down and I returned back to the sewers.  
  
“That is the creepiest noise I think I’ve ever heard,” Dirge complained as I showed off the little song I had composed.  
  
To my chagrin, a solemn nod rippled its way through the thieves sitting around the bar.  
  
“It’s not creepy!” I argued weakly. “It sounds sweet!”  
  
“It sounds like a wisp mother trying to lure children,” Niruin said.  
  
I scoffed at them, but still put the little box back into my satchel, smiling with pleasure at the coin that lined the inside. Between little jobs I helped with and potions I was brewing for the thieves, I was making an impressive profit. Of course, much of it was being sent to Olev. I had promised him that I would pay him back for the bounty on my brother that he traveled across the province to collect that I had effectively stolen away from him by paying off. What wasn’t being sent for someone else was often ending up in the Benevolence’s coffers.  
  
In the last few weeks, I’d done more illegal things than I ever had in my whole life. I was also more pious and praying more often. I never expected that kind of duality to exist, and certainly not in myself, but the sudden complexity of my life and what I was willing to do without losing my sense of self was astonishing.  
  
Because most importantly, I was happy, so very happy to see my life take such an unexpected turn.  
  
The thieves were always guarded, and never quite as affectionate as my friends in Whiterun, or the Windhelm Dunmers, but I felt accepted. The camaraderie experienced through putting your life on the line with people in burglaries and heists just isn’t built the same, I suppose. These people trusted me with their lives, just like I trusted my own with theirs.  
  
One more big haul, and I would have enough to pay the last of my ten-thousand Septim debt. But it had to be big, and Brynjolf promised just that.  
  
We were going all the way to Ivarstead. Apparently, one of the mill workers had a massive stockpile of furs for some ungodly reason. They were coarse bear furs, but those would still fetch a high price in high volumes.  
  
“You’re sure these are  _furs_  and not  _firs_?” Vex asked Delvin accusingly.  
  
“This time, I’m very sure,” Delvin said in his gravelly drawl. “Woman hates bears. She’s paying a fair price for anyone who’ll kill them and bring their hides as proof. Which means she must also have a great deal of coin to be taken, too.”  
  
I was going with Cyrnric, Rune, and Thrynn. The large group was partially because of the huge weight we’d be hauling. I was brewing potions to increase their strength so that they could carry more at once, and I would be making the distraction in the first place. Our target was the owner of the saw mill, a tough woman who would smell trouble and would gut every one of us if we were caught. Also, the town was so small, we would be noticed by any number of curious neighbors or concerned guards. In Riften, a stray shadow could blend into a crowd—in a cozy village, secrecy was far more difficult. Especially if secrecy entails carrying dozens of heavy pelts out of someone’s house and into a cart. It was the most responsibility I’d been given yet, but I was thrilled at the opportunities that this job gave me. My potions were being put to the test, and my magic was going to be pushed to its limits.  
  
The road to Ivarstead was quiet and beautiful. The birch trees sighed in the springtime wind, mountain flowers rustled with bunnies and butterflies, and Lake Honrich glittered like glass covered in sapphires. In the back of the cart, Rune and Cynric talked in low voices. Up front with me, Thrynn steered the horse and taught me how to keep it under control. I’d never ridden a horse before and knew nothing of the creatures, which he thought was absurd considering all the traveling I did, but this beast was very well-tempered and easy to drive.  
  
Lake Honrich gave way to the Treva River, and we camped for the night. By the light of the fire, we huddled next to the cart away from the road.  
  
Basking in the warmth of the campfire, we traded stories, jokes, ate and laughed. I felt safe with these dangerous rogues, as stupid as it may have been. One of them, a self-confessed former highwayman and bandit, sat directly beside me, the heat between us hotter than the flames licking at our toes.  
  
“So Garthek, he orders us to kill the rest,” Thrynn said with a hiss in his already sharp voice.  
  
“You wouldn’t normally kill them?” I asked. “They were just women and children! It wasn’t enough that he killed all the men?”  
  
“No. We usually let them go,” Thrynn said. “I refused to do it, so Garthek ordered them to kill me as well.”  
  
My gasp was a bit unnecessary, since he obviously survived the ordeal one way or another, I think he appreciated my concern. The subtle twitch at his lip seemed to indicate as much, anyway.  
  
“Luckily, I’d made some friends in the clan who immediately sided with me. And we…” He gave a matter-of-fact shrug. “We tore each other to pieces. Those of us who survived just… went our separate ways.” He flashed me a small smirk. “And you met me right after that. I found a new clan, the ones holed up in Helgen. I was with them a week before I knew I had to move on. Brynjolf pulled me into the guild, told me they were lacking some muscle. And that was it.”  
  
“Amazing,” I sighed. “And that’s why you didn’t kill me?”  
  
Thrynn nodded in a sharp, single motion. “I wasn’t going to follow Garthek’s orders, dead or not. You had nothing to steal; killing you would have been just as pointless as killing those women and children in the caravan.”  
  
“Thrynn!” Rune teased through a mouthful of cheese. “You are just the kindest man! Why don’t you ever go with Brina to the temple? You could fool me for a priest!”  
  
“You could fool me for a corpse,” Thrynn shot back.  
  
The burning birch and the soft hoots of owls in the trees made for a more intimate setting than the Flagon ever did, and we found ourselves up for hours talking, passing one bottle of Black-Briar mead from person to person, sharing our lives with openness I hadn’t expected from this little thievery.  
  
“You’re here because of your brother, right?” Cynric said, pausing to tip the bottle of mead back and taking the last few drops. “Why is he here?”  
  
I rolled my eyes without meaning to. “Adventure,” I groaned. “He’s had an insatiable thirst for adventure his whole life. Always obsessed with fairytales and ancient acts of heroism. He’d go on and on about the Hero of Kvatch, the Eternal Champion, and Cyrus, and whatever other stories anyone would put in his head. From the time we were children, he was positively sure that he was going to do something grand. I chased him all across Cyrodiil, seeing the outcomes of his reckless ‘adventures.’ Eventually, he’d explored our homeland enough and decided a one-man invasion of Skyrim was in order.”  
  
Cyrnric pulled the label from the bottle and set it in the flames, and the lot of us stared at the curling parchment like moths as he spoke. “You know he won’t go back to Kvatch, then. If he’s so set in his desire to be a great champion, why would he give it up for a farm?”  
  
“Well, maybe being a hero will change his mind,” I said with such stupid optimism that even I had to cringe at myself. “He’ll save all of Tamriel. And then his dreams will come true, and he can let go.”  
  
Rune shook his head before I finished. “I hope for the best for you, Brina, but… you’re not that stupid. It’s like Brynjolf’s been saying, your childishness is self-inflicted. You’re making the choice to be so naïve. Is it really worth the grief you’re saving yourself from now, if you’re bound to be disappointed in the end?”  
  
My tongue dragged across my lips, wishing that we had another bottle of mead to erase the acidic taste his wise words left in my mouth. “And what do you propose? I just give up after five years?”  
  
None of the three thieves missed a beat in answering, with far more callousness than I’d have liked, “Yes.”  
  
“Your potential is all there,” Cynric said. “You can stay with us. You’ve got a home in Whiterun, also. And as long as your brother doesn’t give a shit about you, there’s no sense in wanting a future back at some stupid little farm. Get your own future. Take your life into your own hands.”  
  
I was getting this speech from too many people. They didn’t know how I felt about Big Brother. He was my hero, my inspiration, my first memory and my goal. Telling me to let him go was telling me to let go of the road I’d walked all these years, and to let go of the only family, the only promise of home that I had left! But how could everyone be wrong? And it really was everyone saying this.  
  
Heaving a sigh, I let myself slip sideways to rest against Thrynn. I waited for him to stiffen, or show some sign of discomfort, and instead was instead met with an arm looping over my shoulder and clenching the folds of my cloak. “Maybe you’re right,” I said, uttering words I’d have slapped myself for just a couple months ago.  
  
I woke up in Thrynn’s arms, the two of us wrapped up chastely together in our cloaks, my head resting on his rising and falling chest. Rune, who was awake after being the last person on watch duty, munched on some bread and tossed the heel of the loaf my way when he saw me stir. There was no time for me to enjoy breakfast, though, as we were waking Thrynn and Cynric and getting the horse harnessed for another day of journeying. Thrynn insisted we make better time today so that we could get to Ivarstead by night. We rode uncomfortably, rumbling over the rocky roads much faster than our cart or horse would prefer; we saw little payoff, since the birch forests seemed to go on and on endlessly, with no sign of our destination for many, many hours.  
  
“The Rift is beautiful,” I declared, despite the view being a bit marred by Cynric shooting pine thrushes out of the air to alleviate his boredom. “There are so many plants, and so many fungi, it’s an alchemist’s dream out here!”  
  
“That’s what you really want to do, right?” Rune asked. “You want to be an alchemist?”  
  
“It already is what I do,” I argued. “I brew potions all the time.”  
  
“But, the point is,” Cynric said as he dropped back onto his seat with a satisfied smirk that could only be accompanied by the sound of a bird plummeting through the trees and down to the ground, “you want to be an alchemist more than you want to be a farmer. Wouldn’t you rather set up a shop in Riften than go stomping through snow to find that dumbass Dragonborn?” He cleared his throat. “Don’t tell him I called him that.”  
  
“If I ever see him again, I’ll be sure not to let it slip,” I grumbled.  
  
“You know, the Flagon used to have all sorts of merchants,” Cyrnric continued wistfully. “Back before we hit that rough patch, we were kings. There even used to be an alchemist that worked almost exclusively for the guild. Maybe once we get back on our feet, you can fill that role. You’ve already been doing that for the most part, but you could be a real alchemist with your own shop and everything.”  
  
The prospect turned my face burning red. Sure, Arcadia had made me her apprentice, but I’d never really considered being a real apothecary like that! It was... appealing. A heart-wrenching longing I hadn’t expected pulled at my chest the more I thought about it. One of those empty little nooks in the Ragged Flagon could be mine. I could brew and sell by day, drink and dance by night. And my brother would just be a distant memory…  
  
I shook the thought away. “I’m glad you think I could do it. I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, forcing my voice to a noncommittal, unimpressed cadence.  
  
A tapestry of waving auroras and twinkling stars stretched over the quaint village of Ivarstead when we finally arrived just after twilight.   
  
To the east, a barrow cast an eerie shadow over the whole village. This lot was notoriously superstitious, so I had to work my ruse around that. Supposedly, otherworldly denizens of the crypt haunted the town.  
  
Probably, they thought the clamor of thunder above the barrow was some expression of rage of the ghosts within. It lasted all night, along with swirling orbs of light that danced past windows and under doors. The wind groaned with just a little too much of a human voice to be just the trees; screams in the barrow were the stuff of nightmares, as was the rattling in their thatch roofs. Fear spells magnified the effects, of course. I justified this by reminding myself that, by tomorrow, all their torment would be erased and replace with elation.  
  
By morning, the entire town was inching out of their homes with trepidation and worry, many clutching amulets of the Nine and swearing that the barrow was worse than ever before.  
  
Thus began the second part of my illusion, which didn’t involve magic at all. I strolled into the town, alone, dressed head-to-toe in the cascading goldenrod robes of priesthood and an amulet of Stendarr around my slender neck. Why the guild happened to have these items was beyond me, and far be it from me to ask; Brynjolf grinned wide as a wolf when I asked to borrow them, and I guessed they were meant for no good anyway.  
  
A stranger walking into town was sure to get peoples’ attention in such a tight-knit community, but a priest arriving the night after horrible poltergeist activity made me into a celebrity rather than an intruder or passing pilgrim.  
  
“Thank the Gods!” a farmer proclaimed, abandoning his field at the sight of me. In minutes, I was confident that almost the whole village had gathered to meet me.  
  
Standing straight, remembering smooth rhythm Danica used to speak in, I also did my best to mimic the authorative tone of Legion officials that was proudly referred to as the Voice of the Emperor by fellow Imperials. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I started, feeling how Brynjolf must when reeling people into his cons, “the terror caused by the barrow to the east has come to the attention of the valiant order of the Vigilants of Stendarr! I have come, at the behest of the God of Mercy Himself, to personally exorcize the evils that dwell within its cursed halls!” The rapt attention of every citizen sent waves of adrenaline through me. I couldn’t tell if I sounded like a rambling fool or not, but the rush I was feeling kept my mouth moving. “But the wickedness within the barrow has taken root in your hearts, in the form of the fear that it has infected each and every one of you with! The only way I can perform this exorcism is with the active participation of every man, woman, and child in this village! If a single one of you does not attend and help to purge its influence, then it shall rise again like a weed that has been spared a single seed! Gather all the townsfolk!” I waved my arms dramatically, stirring the crowd into a frenzy. “I need everyone at the barrow with me, and we can begin!”  
  
Already, their hopeful smiles and determined cheers eased my guilty conscience for making them all so miserable the night before.  
  
Days of practicing illusion spells made me confident that I could fake a theatrical yet convincing exorcism for the town. Most of these barrows only housed the restless dead in its lowest chambers, so I had little concern that any real haunting of the town was taking place; they were a bunch of superstitious folk living in the shadow of an ancient dungeon, that was all. Any ghosts encountered would be of my own creation.  
  
I led the villagers up to the barrow, instructing them to hold hands and orchestrating a silly little prayer that I made up on the spot. Then, I lifted my hands as though summoning the power of Stendarr, but actually enacting a spell to make harmless lights dance about like wisps.  
  
For a split moment, I was shocked by my own ability. Not only did I make little ghostly lights appear, but I created the image of a specter standing right at the entrance of the barrow!  
  
My moment of stupidity passed quickly in the wake of the ghost shooting a bolt of lightning my direction. I couldn’t think to throw a ward over me, my surprise leaving my hands dumb, but I did manage to dive to the ground before the bolt could seize me. From my spot on the earth, I tossed a ball of fire at the ghost that caught him and shrouded his ethereal outline in flames.  
  
Behind me, my audience gasped and cried out. It looked like I was performing an exorcism for real after all.  
  
Lightning continued to crack around me, electrifying the air to make my hair frizz out more than usual. In response, I bolted forward and to my feet in a single push of my legs, like a rabbit darting through the brush. Vortexes of cold whirled in my palms and swept out in graceful flurries of snow. Despite its pretty appearance, however, it chilled the ghost to temperatures colder than death, pausing it mid-spell.  
  
Both of my hands severed the streams of cold before pulling together, weaving an inferno between my fingertips that I then released in a sizzling scream of steam and roar of primordial fire. The ghost’s shimmering blue silhouette burst into a small sun in front of me and the dumbstruck crowd, shrieking in pain like a living man in the throes of a terrible death.  
  
Despite being once again amazed at the magical powers I could harness in dire straits, and deeply disturbed by the pile of ashes that seemed a little too solid for a mere apparition, I allowed myself only one breath to steady myself before turning around to the villagers behind me.  
  
They all looked how I felt: mouths agape, eyes wide, not sure whether to celebrate or to back away slowly. I forced a smile on my face, gesturing to the still-smoking ground where the ghost had last stood. “We have exorcized the barrow!” I declared with as few tremors in my voice as I could help. “Good job, everyone! You can now rest easy, knowing the ghost’s reign of terror has ended!”  
  
I would have to ask Brynjolf if any of his ploys had played out like this. My nerves rattled in my head like loose cogs on a Dwemer contraption, and it took all my focus just to keep from shaking at the completely unexpected attack.  
  
Slowly, the villagers began to clap and thank me, until finally the tension gave way to truly relieved laughs and sighs. And, despite my own shaken wits, I was smiling and clapping the townsfolk on the shoulders, taking pride in knowing that, meaning to or not, I had indeed done priestly work in eradicating a malevolent spirit.  
  
By the time the whole ordeal had ended, the sun climbed to the zenith. Thrynn, Rune, and Cynric would be waiting for me down the road, out of sight of Ivarstead with a cart packed full of furs. I dismissed myself with a gallant declaration of the town being officially safe and under the protection of the Gods, and excused myself to return to the Vigilants to the chorus of thankful citizens behind me.  
  
Sure, it had all been meant as a big ruse to facilitate a burglary, but I still wound up a hero in the end. The pride was glowing on my face when I made it down the road to where my companions milled around impatiently.  
  
“Brina!” Thrynn spat like a curse when I arrived. “What in Oblivion took you so damn long?”  
  
“There were screams and explosions—it sounded like when Delvin stole Vex’s smalls,” Cynric exclaimed.  
  
Still beaming ear-to-ear like a fool, I hopped into the back of the cart on the mountain of ill-gotten pelts, and recounted my morning over and over again, more amazed with myself with every telling.  
  
  
 _18th of Rain’s Hand,_  
 _Dear Big Brother,_  
  
 _You’re part of the guild, so you must know Thrynn. I hope knowing him in a professional setting, as a peer, would make you respect him more than the young men who courted me in Kvatch, who you turned away with broken noses and dislocated arms at the smallest signs of their interest in me. Despite his being an aggressive sort, with a strong arm and a selective conscience, he has his own moral code that he adheres to, and a genuine concern for me. I think I care for him. I might even be falling for him. I dearly hope that you don’t try to kill him for it like so many others._  
  
 _I’ve experienced so much in the guild, so many new kinds of friendships and love, and so many new facets of myself._  
  
 _The guild has allowed me to toe my moral boundaries, to find where the lines are fine and to see into my own soul. I would never harm a person, not willfully, but I know that fate does not show mercy to those who hold themselves to higher standards. I do not partake in thievery itself, and I wouldn’t want to, but I have surprised myself with the things that I am willing to do, and the things that I can forgive myself for. Is this how you felt when you first joined them?_  
  
  
I tucked the leather journal under my head to serve as a pillow, but it was soon abandoned on the soft grass in exchange for Thrynn’s warm chest and the hypnotic beating of his heart. It was his turn on guard duty as the others slept, but he insisted he could stay awake despite me curling against him as he sat propped against an obliging tree.  
  
I helped him keep from dozing off by talking with him long after the campfire dimmed to a lazy flicker. Jobs he’d done, his first glorious years as a bandit, all the things wrong with the Helgen clan, he talked with a trust I wouldn’t have dared hope for. In return, I told him about my humble life back in Cyrodiil, and the unintended and unwanted adventures experienced since Mother and Father’s deaths.  
  
The red war paint on his face fascinated me and kept me focused when my lids got heavy, and in the every-changing shadows cast by our dying fire, I could see the lines shift from streaks of blood, to crows mid-flightthe color of midnight, to cracks along the surface of his face that looked into the mysterious man I still barely knew. Somewhere between pondering the war paint and the cold eyes that had seen me stumble to the wall of Helgen and let me live, I realized how close his face had become. A moment later, and the highwayman rocked me backward to the ground, leaning over me and taking my mouth with his.  
  
With Rune and Cynric just a few feet from us, I couldn’t help but fear for their jeering remarks to end the sudden development any moment.  
  
My face was flushed and my heart sputtering when Thrynn pulled me back onto his lap not-quite-chastely with one leg on either side of him, continuing the kiss for a long time after with subtle shifts and lifts of his hips that made me light-headed and breathless. Thrynn took a little too much satisfaction in running his hands over the ochre priest robes and the gasps I tried to keep subdued as not to wake our almost-definitely listening companions while he pulled said robes up my thighs. He kissed me to muffle my sighs and moans, not at all minding the pull of my hands in his mane.  
  
  
 _19th of Rain’s Hand,_  
  
 _Please don’t kill Thrynn. Please, please, please don’t kill Thrynn._  
  
  
Rune drove the cart in the morning, and I curled up in the back buried in the pelts, satisfied as I’d ever felt after a long night spent wide-awake. When the sun rose, I fell into a warm slumber.  
  
I dreamt of the Breton woman in Kynesgrove. I heard her whisper in my ear, and felt her holding my hand with the affection of a mother, a friend, a lover, a sister. I was still wrapped in golden robes, lost in a dark forest filled with cutthroats and rogues. I had been trying to build a house in those shadowy woods, but it won’t stay up, and she promised to guide me to a steadfast little farmhouse in the sun. Give up on the pile of sticks I call a home, she told me, this is not my place and I am only poisoning my soul by trying to adapt to a world that is not mine. How could this world not be mine? I asked. What about Thrynn? What about Brynjolf and Sapphire and Tonilia and all the others? I knew without seeing them that they were hiding somewhere in the forest.  
  
But the Breton just smiled sadly, and pulled my hand again. I could follow her now, or stay in the forest and learn what she meant myself.  
  
I pulled my hand away, and told her I would stay with my friends.  
  
She nodded, and told me to find her when I was ready. She would wait. The calm sureness of her voice frightened me more than anything, like she knew a secret that I didn’t want to learn.  
  
I woke up at as we rolled just into view of the southern gate of Riften to the singing of a nightingale in a tree above me and the pain of Janan’s music box sticking painfully in my back. And for just a brief instant, the beautiful birch forest looked dark as Ama—how did I suddenly know her name?—had promised.


	14. In Which She is Accused

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Despite the friendships made and the love forged down in the Cistern, key events have taken place in the Thieves Guild that will force a dramatic change in the life and future Brina was making for herself. The world is turned upside-down for her once again, and there's nowhere left to go but up.

### Chapter Fourteen

Something was wrong. No one met us at the south gate to help unload the furs as planned, so we milled about by the cart while Rune ran to the sanctum to see what was going on. Minutes, what might have been an hour, passed in painful, worried silence until Rune returned with an ashen face and strangely apologetic eyes.  
  
“Come on back to the cistern,” he said. The tension made his Nordic accent especially thick, and almost made the order sound more like he was asking me to step up to a guillotine rather than return home. He help up his hand when Thrynn clutched my arm protectively and began walking at my side. “Except you, Thrynn. Mercer says you need to stay… guard the loot and all.” He swallowed down something else he wanted to say, some piece of vital information that he had been told to keep hidden.  
  
But, unable to go against Mercer Frey’s direct order, Thrynn gave a grunt of acknowledgement and held back, letting go of me with just the smallest nod of reassurance before I followed my other guildmates to the mausoleum.  
  
The ominous cloud that hung in the air grew so thick I could hardly breathe when he finally descended into the darkness of the hideout. Waiting for us was the entire guild, their eyes shooting to us—to  _me_  – as we entered.  
  
“Just a little too late for the family reunion!” Mercer jeered when I stepped to the center of the cistern to meet him. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, like some poor little lamb up for the slaughter.”  
  
“I don’t understand,” I said meekly. “My brother was here?”  
  
The lines on Mercer’s face filled as his expression twisted into a sardonic sneer. “Oh, yes, just as planned. Led me right into Karliah’s trap, as the three of you had been plotting all along. Enough with that stupid stare of yours; the game is over!” One wicked hand lashed forward faster than I could follow, catching me by the collar of the ochre priest robes I wore. He pulled roughly so that I fell into his other waiting hand, which clutched hard under my arm. “Your brother is dead! When I realized that he was Karliah’s pawn all along, I put an end to the son of a bitch. But that left one loose end still: you. You think I wouldn’t figure it out?” He shook me, drawing a started cry from my lips that echoed through the vast stone structure.  
  
Then, he spun me around so that I could face the crowd of thieves that surrounded us. They all stood, stoic and silent, some with arms crossed and some with angry glowers. These were not my friends, and for the first time since first arriving in the Flagon, I felt unwelcome. I felt hated.  
  
“This little wretch,” Mercer said, presenting me to the uncaring glares of every criminal in the cistern, “did not come to us by accident. It was no coincidence that she started working with us, started living among us. Like her dead bastard of a brother, she’s one of Karliah’s own, and we just let her invade without batting an eye. And her role in Karliah’s manipulations didn’t start here in Riften. Oh, no! Guess where the bitch was before coming to the Rift?” Another jarring shake of my shoulders sent me stumbling forward and down to the ground. “Honningbrew Meadery! She was there just in time to help her brother and everything! Coincidences like these  _don’t happen_ , and certainly not when there’s a sociopathic traitor pulling the strings behind them.” Mercer shouted so venomously that dust fell from the cistern’s ceiling.  
  
How was anyone believing this? I didn’t even know who Karliah was, and I certainly wasn’t working for her! What did my brief time working in Honningbrew have to do with anything? Where had he gotten these ridiculous ideas from? I looked back at him, meaning to argue, but his boot colliding with my head turned my eyes obediently back to the stones. In that brief instant that I saw him, though, the glint of a pendant around his neck, three little guild marks radiating from a central hub, made my stomach drop for reasons I couldn’t place.  
  
His foot stayed down, pressing hard on my back to keep me still while my dumbfounded confusion festered into fear. I was missing something here, something huge and dangerous, that the whole rest of the guild was in on. And, knowing nothing about his allegations, I could think of nothing that might satisfy them in believing my innocence. I didn’t know what to refute, what to say, beyond whimpers that I didn’t know what he was talking about and that I would never, never betray them, all sputtered futilely into the dirty sewer floor beneath me. When I got it in my head to struggle and try to stand, Mercer’s foot went down harder on my back, forcing a scream from my lungs and making my legs twitch helplessly against the stones.  
  
The guildmaster’s grating voice shook the cistern as he bellowed, “Not one traitor, but two, working under the orders of the greatest traitor of them all!” He took me by a fistful of hair, pulling me up to once again face the sea of judgmental, hateful faces. “Who wants to reunite her with her brother?”  
  
My confused scream was cut short by Dirge, who lifted me by the throat from the floor. A few cries of outrage sounded around me, but I couldn’t tell if they were in support of me, or support of Dirge breaking my neck. Over the shouts, I heard Mercer hiss at Brynjolf, “Next time you get it in your head to bring someone new into the fold, you remember these last two failures of yours and think about why you’re not the fucking guildmaster. Got it?”  
  
I didn’t want to hurt Dirge, really. I didn’t want to hurt anyone at all, least of all my friends in the guild. But my vision was starting to blur and grow spotted. My extremities were starting to feel like pins and needles, and I swore I heard a  _crack_  somewhere under Dirge’s grip.  
  
So, with my heart banging with fear, pain, and remorse against my chest, I reached my hands toward Dirge’s face. The look of surprise he gave when fire licked his eyebrows and lashed right off of his face told me he probably thought I was just weakly trying to bat him away.  
  
He cursed, throwing me violently down where I bounced like a skipped stone over the floor. Luckily, he had thrown me in the direction of the cistern’s exit, so I scrambled desperately through the thieves to the rickety ladder.  
  
Instead of falling on me to continue the struggle, the thieves parted for me like the pariah I now was. Sapphire spat on me when I passed her, and several iterations of “good riddance” and “fuck off” followed me out of the hideout. Someone kicked me in the back of my knee, sending me to the floor yet again to crawl the rest of the way to the ladder.  
  
So, that was why Thrynn hadn’t been invited. He would have been the only person who would have come to my defense, and Mercer must have known that. I wanted to run right to him, to tell him of the atrocious accusations that had been flung my way, when the horrible thought dawned on me: was he excluded because he would have protected me, or because he  _might_  have protected me? Would he really forsake his guild for a woman that he’d only just slept with once, and as far as I knew, had no deeper emotional attachment to?  
  
And even if he would side with me, how could I turn him against the people who were his family, in the place that was his home? If I could convince him of my innocence, would the sacrifice he would make for me be worthwhile? Could I justify ruining his life for my own sake?  
  
This wasn’t the first time I was alone, I told myself as I stumbled, rubbing my bruised neck, through the graveyard. I could survive without the guild, but it would take a self of entitlement and selfishness that I just didn’t have in me to ask Thrynn to live without the guild as well.  
  
Instead of run to him, I staggered into the Benevolence of Mara. Dinya and Maramal turned to me, shocked at my haggard appearance and priestly garb, and immediately took me by either arm to lead me gently to the front-most pew in front of the statue of Mara.  
  
“What happened to you, Brina?” Dinya Balu asked, stroking my hair back from my face like a mother to a sick child.  
  
I couldn’t say. Truthfully, I hadn’t the slightest clue what happened. As far as I could tell, Mercer lied about me and Brother. Maybe not that Brother was a traitor, that much I wouldn’t put past him anymore, but he definitely lied that Brother was dead. No way in any realm of Oblivion could that devious old man kill my big brother.   
  
So, instead of offering a coherent response, I choked in a raspy voice turned my whole throat to fire, “I need to see Ama Nin. She told me she would be waiting for me.”  
  
The two priests went silent, sharing some unfathomable silent conversation over me with long stares and subtle expressions.  
  
“Is she here?” I croaked.  
  
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” Dinya said, pulling me up carefully and leading me to one of the rooms off of the main chapel. With a little basin of water, Dinya wiped the sweat and dirt from my face, and helped me out of the robes. Maramal gave us privacy until I was dressed in a fresh and legitimately-gotten robe.  
  
I’d had enough of the uncertainty. I asked again, “Is Ama Nin here? I wasn’t so sure that she would be, it was just a dream when she told me to find her, but the way you two looked at each other… there is something, isn’t there?”  
  
Maramal patted me on the shoulder, and nodded toward a bed. “We have received our own messages from Lady Mara. Rest tonight. Tomorrow, your new journey will begin.”  
  
If he hadn’t said it with such a warm, calm voice, I would have taken that cryptic promise as a threat.  
  
Unlike my last sleep, I didn’t dream of Ama. This time, it was Thrynn in my thoughts, and the very short romance we’d shared. Just two nights spent in his arms, just one night of real intimacy, and it was already over. But it wasn’t just the romance that made my heart break for him. For the weeks I had been part of the guild, he was on almost every mission I was sent on. On a dozen occasions, he walked into danger, trusting me with his life that I would ensure his return. He did little things that he could for me, from tracking down a fake courier and leaving him with six fewer teeth, to carrying me knee-deep through sewage, to scaling the walls of Mistveil Keep to collect a sample of moss I saw growing on the roof. And this wasn’t just any man who I’d enjoyed a drink or two with; this was the first person I met in Skyrim, and the man who saved my life. I owed everything to him, and that moment of recognition in the alley had been as elating as watching the dragon at Whiterun get cut down. He spoke with the harsh, cold attitude of a man who spent years as a bandit, with dark and gloomy eyes, but his smirks and biting laughs were genuine. I could replay the many nights we sat in the Ragged Flagon, talking out the last job, or with me sitting on his lap while he cheated through a hand of cards, for hours on end, and smile through each memory as if I were still there.  
  
And just like that, it was over. Did he already know all of Mercer’s accusations? Did he already hate me?  
  
I woke feeling someone’s arms around me, and opened my eyes to see his russet hair in my face. Instead, the arms were thin and delicate, and the person looking down on me was more like an outline of starlight, filled in by the faintest rays of morning sun and the swirl of dancing motes of dust.  
  
Experimentally, I whispered, “Ama?”  
  
When I blinked a few time to clear the mist of sleep from my eyes, I saw that no one was there at all. I was alone, embraced only in the tight wrap of blankets and bathed in the light of dawn. The priests were already awake and going about their duties, so I slipped on the outfit that was at the foot of my bed, which I assumed Dinya had left for me. The clothes were dark, including a long skirt with a high waist that clasped with silver brass buttons and stripes of red along the hem, a flowy red blouse with sleeves that caught even the slightest breeze, and a charcoal-colored bodice that seemed to magically fill out my scrawny frame.  
  
It was a generous loan, and I was thrilled to wear it. My first words would have been thanks for the care they had given me and the beautiful clothes I was being allowed to borrow, except that Dinya looked me over with an expression of surprise.  
  
“I didn’t know you had an extra set of clothes,” she remarked. “I was just about to bring you a clean dress.”  
  
“I… I didn’t,” I answered honestly.  
  
Her lips pursed, and she gave a little nod and waved to a pew. Whatever was going on here, she certainly had a better idea of than I did. “Two nights ago, Mara delivered my husband and I each a message. She told me that you would be coming to us in a time of need, and we should shelter you with the compassion expected of her followers. And to Maramal…” Her voice trailed off as Maramal sat down on the other side of me.  
  
“She told me,” he said, “that you are to go on a pilgrimage, which will help to heal you, and shall lead you out of harm’s way. After your pilgrimage, you are invited to join our order, and live as an expression of Mara’s love.”  
  
“I’m supposed to be a priest?” I asked.  
  
His nod was proud. “If you so choose, but Mara has shown us both the image of you in gold. We all deeply believe that your destiny lies in the clergy. In the meantime, you are to go on a quest in her name. This quest will purge your soul of the darkness that others have been fostering within you, and shall lead you out of an impending danger that haunts your footsteps.”  
  
“Are Mara’s messages always so cryptic and menacing?”  
  
They smiled sweetly at me, like parents chuckling away their child’s unintentionally inappropriate slip of tongue. “No, Brina,” Dinya said. “You have heard our Lady’s voice, and you have heard the infinite love and compassion in them. Do not fear her divine intervention, for she will guide you down the path of enlightenment.”  
  
This was already weird. I wouldn’t go out of my way to make it weirder. So I sighed away all my trepidation and discomfort and asked plainly, “What is my pilgrimage?”  
  
They explained it to me as I was outfitted in another fresh robe that fell over my current outfit (which neither of them even so much as suggested that I remove), and my satchel and black bandolier were filled with food and supplies. A waterskin filled with fresh water was attached to the strap of my satchel, as was a tightly folded blanket. This was the most prepared for a journey I had been in a long, long time.  
  
“There’s a priest of Mara far to the north in Dawnstar,” Maramal told me. “He is trying to cleanse the town of a curse that haunts their sleep ruthlessly with nightmares.”  
  
I could sympathize with that, I thought bitterly.  
  
“You shall go and assist him. Purify the town of its curse, and you shall purify your own heart in the process,” he said.  
  
I was ready to go. They had been kind enough to give me a robe with a cowl so that I could hide my bruised face on the way out of the city, and avoid any more conflict with any thieves that I might cross as I left. As a final touch, Dinya set an Amulet of Mara over my shoulders, letting it fall with a comforting weight at the top of my sternum. For all of my hesitance to follow through with this sudden development, the symbol was oddly calming.  
  
Ama told me to come to her, and I did. I chose this, and I would see it through, I decided.  
  
Maramal, Dinya, and Briehl the acolyte all gave me familial hugs of farewell. It felt like leaving home, albeit a home where my whole family is a bunch of slightly-crazed zealots.  
  
The door to the Benevolence closed behind me, cutting off the sense of love and comfort and leaving me to an unwelcoming caricature of the city that had once been a playground to me. The shadows were no longer places where I would wait as backup in case one of my brethren got caught pickpocketing; now, it was a place where someone who might recognize me would throttle me from. Every body in the crowded streets could have been a threat. Instead of looking for Thrynn, eager to “accidentally” brush my hand on his as I passed like I used to, I was looking straight ahead and praying that I wouldn’t cross any of the thieves.  
  
Were they looking for me?  
  
Did they even care what happened to me, as long as I was gone from their haven in the sewers?  
  
Would anyone ever know that all Mercer said was false?  
  
The trek through the dirty, loud city felt like wading through a spike pit, until at last I slipped out the main gate and burst into a sprint to get that place, and everyone I loved and all of the shame and confusion and fear as far away as I could.  
  
It was better, I decided, to avoid Ivarstead since my recent excursion there. Instead, I went straight north, cutting off the paved road to a safer, less bandit-ridden country road that led me right into Shor’s Stone.  
  
Though there was no inn in the town, the same generous woman who’d allowed Olev to heal in her home let me sleep at the hearth. When I asked what became of Olev, the pretty Nord said, “He healed up very well, especially when he got a care package from you. You are the same girl who brought him here after the bandit attack, right?” She paused until I confirmed with a nod. “Well, he was doing well enough, and then a man walks up with a little bag full of gemstones, and says they’re from you. You should have seen his face! He didn’t think you were actually going to send him anything! He swore up and down that he’d just been teasing when he said you’d need to pay him for the bounty he wouldn’t be collecting on your brother.”  
  
The blood vessel right beside my eye wanted to burst when she said that. I sent him how much money worth of precious stones, all because he’d been  _joking_  with me?! If it was just a joke, why did he have to sound so serious about it every time I brought it up! Oh, his sense of humor would earn him a new scar I swore!  
  
“But he said he’d pay you back when he sees you again,” Sylgja continued, seeing how upset I was becoming. “He counted about four thousand septims worth of garnets, rubies, and sapphires. Does that sound about right?” My last payment to him would have been for the bear pelt haul from Ivarstead, so yes, I nodded, that was right. “Well, if he was hurt before getting that, he didn’t show it. He went right on his way, back north the way you two came.”  
  
Well, at least he acknowledged my kindness, and I could expect to call in a favor next time our paths crossed. That eased my anger considerably, as well as the bowl of stew that Sylgja set before me. After serving me where I sat on the hearth, she limped back to her chair near the wall.  
  
“Is your leg hurt?” I asked. “The robes are only just a little for show, you know. I am a bit of a healer. I can take a look.”  
  
“Oh, thank you, but that won’t be needed,” she said with an appreciative smile. “It’s already been healed. It just won’t ever be what it used to. Actually, it’s a miracle I can walk at all. I was injured badly in an accident in the mine. A priest of Mara passing on his way to Dawnstar happened to be near enough to help, and thanks to him my leg didn’t have to be replaced with a peg.”  
  
“Praise be to Mara,” I said dutifully, amazing myself with how right the words sounded coming out of my mouth. Really, her story sounded all too familiar. I rubbed my left calf experimentally, wondering if there were still chucks of bone floating around in the muscle like Danica had once told me there would be. Then, realizing just what she said, I added, “Who was this priest?”  
  
Sylgja laughed. “Yes, yes, praise be to Mara! Her priest was a Dark elf, who said he once lived in Dawnstar and was returning. He was on a mission…”  
  
“A pilgrimage?” I shamelessly interrupted. Ducking my head apologetically, I went to slurping my stew to keep from cutting in again.  
  
“Yes, something like that. The people of Dawnstar needed his help, but he didn’t give much more than that. We were a bit distracted with my leg during his visit, so I didn’t think to ask him many questions.”  
  
“What was his name?” I slurred through a mouthful of beef and gravy, unable to help myself. “What was he like?”  
  
Sylgja had to think for a moment, and tried to foreign name on her Nord tongue for the first  time in a long time. “Eradnor? I don’t quite know how he said it. But he was a kind man, very generous, and didn’t expect a thing from me in return for setting and healing my leg. He was also tall, with those bright red eyes that Dark Elves have.”  
  
That much information was already far more than I’d started my quest with. Thanking her for the meal and the warm hearth to sleep on, I slept soundly, and only dreamt of my thieves guild companions cursing me and throwing me out for half of the night. The other half, thankfully, I was allowed illusions of Thrynn as if I had never been expelled from the guild, of the two of us embracing in his bed in the cistern.  
  
I woke feeling a pit of loneliness at the bottom of my stomach. To thank my host, I dug a ruby that had been earned assisting a simple numbers job for Delvin from the bottom of my satchel and left it on the hearth, then slipped out without a word before the sun had even risen.  
  
He was just a thief. I only knew him for a few weeks, really. We’d only ever made love one night. Biting my lip punishingly, I reminded myself of all the reasons not to mourn for my lost love. Love? That was’t love, damn it! This, this was exactly the kind of thinking I had to rid myself of if I was going to get over this! And the rest of the guild all deserved each other, the turn-coat bastards! None of them did a damn thing to help me!  
  
Getting angry would spare me from being sad, I decided. So I hissed under my breath and damned them until I felt a little better, and prayed to Mara for forgiveness for my cruel thoughts. This was a vicious cycle that I hoped ended very, very soon.  
  
I was able to cut west north of Shor’s Stone, which meant that I wouldn’t be passing through the incredible volcanic springs again. It was probably safer going the route where I couldn’t fall into a mineral spring, anyway. At least, that was the justification I used to keep from feeling too disappointed about my less interesting route.  
  
One night was spent camped under an obliging outcropping of rock. I spent the whole night reliving the battle in Whiterun, the fires and the smoke and the feeling of terror that right on me heels was a Thalmor agent. The next night was spent up a tree where (I hoped) roaming sabre cats wouldn’t try and eat me. This time, I dreamt of the Loreius family, and the strange little jester who had been, while impossibly creepy, also perfectly friendly the whole night we’d shared. I dreamt of the bandit who had caught me by surprise on the road to Windhelm, and I relived my disgust and shame and horror at looking down at the first man I’d ever killed.  
  
By my fourth day on the road, my leg ached with every step and my senses were numb with heartache, but the scenery became more and more familiar. I was walking alongside the White River when a familiar little waterfall caught my eye. That was where I had made my first of many falls since coming to Skyrim, the very one that my left leg would be feeling forever.  
  
I was almost at Whiterun.  
  
What would I say? Who would I go to first? It could only be for a brief stop, just one night to rest, so I couldn’t let people think I was back to stay. I would be firm: No, Arcadia, I’m not here to be your apprentice again, I’m on a pilgrimage.  
  
Just the thought of her eyes welling with tears tore apart my resolve, and as I rehearsed my speech I would give, I heard my voice go high and my words turn to apologies and I-love-you-toos. Pathetic. I was bleeding-heart, pathetic little Brina Stone-Cat, just as always. I just had to hope that no one tried to guilt me into staying longer than intended, because I knew I wouldn’t be stubborn enough to say no.  
  
The sun was setting when I trudged, exhausted, through the front bailey to the gate into the city proper. Everything looked mostly the same as I remembered, except for the blue banners of the Stormcloaks that had joined the city’s horse-on-yellow standards. Seeing my priest robes, the guard at the gate, Leif by the way he slouched at the shoulders and held his hands on his hips, didn’t even bother to question me. The doors opened for me without my needing to even lower the cowl that obscured my face.  
  
Once inside, I saw the townsfolk closing shops and completing the last of their errands before heading back to their homes. The streets were full of life, since the springtime weather begged everyone to spend more time in the outdoors. Children got in their last games before they would be called in to supper, and shopkeepers were bidding one another farewell after a good day in the market.  
  
I had expected to see Arvid at his usual post, standing between the Cauldron and Belethor’s keeping an eye on the market. But in his place was someone else, a new recruit that I didn’t remember. For a split moment, my heart dropped. Had Arvid, sweet, stupid Arvid died in the battle? Or maybe he’d been promoted. Whatever the case was, I didn’t know where to find him short of waltzing into the barracks to ask. And that could wait until after I’d given my surrogate mother the proper hello she deserved.  
  
All of my heartbreak melted when I opened the door to the Cauldron and was hit by the familiar smell of herbs. The pain of leaving behind the burning city in the wake of the battle, the agony of being cast out from the guild in Riften, the nightmares I’d suffered after leaving the Loreius house and killing a man for the first time, the horror I felt upon waking up in a mad necromancer’s laboratory… it all dissolved like spriggan sap in snowberry tea (which it smelled like she’d been brewing recently).  
  
“Welcome,” Arcadia said, not minding the late customer. “If there’s anything I can help you with, you have but to...”  
  
I tugged the cowl of my robe down, and the words died halfway off her lips.  
  
A moment later and she’d rounded the counter and trapped me in the tightest hug possible in anything short of a troll. “By the Gods, Brina! I was so worried about you! After the battle ended, you’d all but disappeared!”  
  
“I know, and I’m sorry. But if I’d stayed,” I said, thinking of the Thalmor woman who’d been searching through the flames for me, “I don’t know that I would have survived at all. But I’m happy to see you!”  
  
Whatever Arcadia said, it was muffled by my robes and choked by her tears. The Cauldron closed early that night so that we could sit by the fire together, sharing everything that had happened to each of us since Sun’s Dawn. It may not have been much time, looking back, but I had experienced several life-altering things since I’d last seen Arcadia, before I was dragged to the Dragonsreach dungeons.  
  
I didn’t even try to tell her I was only going to stay one night. I’d missed her, and everyone else in this city so desperately, and I would need all of tomorrow to catch up with Elrindir, the guards, and all the rest.  
  
A day or two with people I loved was just one thing my soul needed. I like to think that Ama Nin had intended this delay from the beginning as part of my healing, because when I laid down to sleep beside Arcadia, sharing her bed like sisters, I slept the whole night peacefully, without a nightmare or dream to haunt me.


	15. In Which She Breaks Arvid's Heart. His Stupid, Stupid Heart.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Following the horrible heartbreak back in Riften, Brina takes a pause at Whiterun to recover.

### Chapter Fifteen

First thing in the morning, I was dressed in the dark outfit from the Benevolence, with my hair pulled back from my face with a length of ribbon. I wanted to be presentable, to prove to everyone that I was well and healthy and that I was okay even after my disappearance following the Stormcloak takeover. Arcadia fixed a poultice for me that calmed what was left of the inflammation and bruising on my face and neck following my violent last minutes among the thieves guild, and looking at my reflection in one of Arcadia’s polished plates, I didn’t look half bad. I’d been eating well since living in Riften, so while I was still on the skinny side, I was developing more and more of my natural shape.  
  
I looked very healthy, as long as no one looked too hard at the hand-shaped markings across my throat.  
  
The sun had just risen when I showed myself into the Drunken Hunstman from the eastern door. Elrindir was standing behind the counter, counting Septims and hardly taking notice that I had entered at all.  
  
He noticed when I flung my arms around him, singing my relief that he was all in one piece and safe after the horrific battle. We embraced, and I spent the whole morning keeping myself from crying as we talked about what had happened to Anoriath, and his struggles to run the Huntsman alone now that his brother was gone.  
  
“No one has tried finding the killer?” I asked.  
  
Elrindir shook his head grimly. “No. You were blamed for it, and when Sinmir became captain of the guard, you were officially pardoned, but by that point there was no way to find the real killer anymore. Anoriath had already been buried, and there was no way we could determine exactly what poison was used.” He paused, licking his lips. “I went to Arcadia before I informed the guards. I could tell it was poison. I couldn’t believe that you were the killer, but I needed to hear it from her. So, I begged her to figure out what kind of poison had been used, and to tell me if it was one of your making.” He sighed, reliving his relief. “She said that you hardly ever made poisons at all, and most of yours were more like what you made for Anoriath’s hunting. Things to slow the animals, but never to do… what that poison did to him. She identified traces of certain ingredients, things like void salts that were always far too expensive for you to use, and that rarely came into her stock to begin with. If you had made the poison, she would have known.”  
  
I didn’t need him to tell me that I wasn’t the killer, but I appreciated that he knew he could trust me. “So, there’s no way of knowing who did it?”  
  
“It was someone who could afford expensive ingredients, or who would have been able to fight and kill an atronach out in the wild. It was also someone who was stealthy enough to infect him with the poison without his knowing. It was… professional. Though I can’t imagine why anyone would hire… the Dark Brotherhood to kill him,” Elrindir bemoaned.  
  
I turned the conversation to the city, and the repairs that were being made. The general destruction that had befallen the city was mostly repaired, but a handful of homes were utterly destroyed. Elrindir, for being so close to the gate, was spared any harm, and the Huntsman managed to survive with only minor damages.  
  
“I’m just glad that you’re alright,” I said, embracing him for what must have been the tenth time since my arrival. “When I left, I had no way of knowing if anyone I loved would be okay.”  
  
“Since my brother died, it’s hard to say that I’m ever okay,” Elrindir said. “But to see you alive and well puts my heart much more at ease.”  
  
I had to say farewell to him, and he told me I could sleep there tonight. Though he had rented out my old room already, his brother’s bed was still in the main bedroom, and I was welcome to it.  
  
My next stop was one that I both looked forward to and dreaded. The main guard barracks were full of guards off-duty, their helmets off and the mead flowing. In the back of the building, the beds would all be full of the night shift getting their rest, but in the front half of the building every guard not sleeping or actively on duty was gathered to eat, drink, and be generally as rowdy as they discouraged the citizens from being.  
  
It was really just like you would expect from a bunch of young men all thrown into a room together with all the food they can eat, mead they can drink, and all the ego in the world to boast and bicker over. Once upon a time that seemed so very long ago, I would come here to be merry with them, and spent many a night dancing with them on the tables or being hoisted over shoulders in manly displays of strength.  
  
“Trouble?” the first guard said when I walked in. But any question of why I had come was gone the instant I was recognized.  
  
I was swarmed by men in various states of undress, given tight hugs and then passed on until everyone in the barracks had been greeted. “I missed you!” I cried to the lot of them. There were many faces missing, and I didn’t know if it was because they were on duty, or they hadn’t survived the battle. I wasn’t sure if I could take it if I asked for a list of the casualties though, so I asked just about those who I was closest with who weren’t right in the room.  
  
Leif was alive, as I knew since he’d been guarding the gate. Ismo had been killed by a Stormcloak right outside the wall. And Arvid, sweet, stupid, traitorous Arvid…  
  
“Arvid is Sinmir’s right hand,” Villem, a guard who usually patrolled in the Wind District, told me. “He either carries out the commander’s direct orders, or is posted in Dragonsreach proper.”  
  
Well. Good to know that his treachery and treason was being well-rewarded. While I was happy for him,  I was disgusted that he had turned his back on the empire and his city in support of the Stormcloaks who now ruled over Whiterun.  
  
“I can’t imagine that I can just walk into the castle,” I began uncertainly.  
  
“You can stay here,” someone else offered, gesturing to a seat. “He’s bound to be back here at some point.”  
  
It had been my plan from the beginning, so pleased that the offer was made and I didn’t need to just invite myself, I got comfortable.  
  
The guards were all fascinated to hear about my time in Windhelm, and showed appropriate disgust that the guards had been so disinterested in the serial killer who’d been on the loose. My tale of how I’d been kidnapped, escaped, and resulted in his arrest earned me several pats on the back, and had more than a few declare that I should be a guard myself.  
  
When my account turned to Riften, the men around me were no longer guards, but little boys gathering around for an exciting story. The foreign concept of the thieves running the city over any jarl or guard was astounding to them. I described the way the crowd moved, orchestrated to the wills of pickpockets and their scouts who directed traffic to hide the illegal activity and keep the victims flowing. I told them about how every step in the forest was accompanied by the feeling of eyes on your back, and the way that the whole city was a playground to the ones who dwelled in the sewers, around every corner but always just out of sight. I recounted seeing them hop along rooftops like shadows given wings, like things right out of a legend.  
  
I left out the part where I worked for them. Guards and all. But they enjoyed the tales none the less.  
  
The shift changed right before sunset for the first night watch. I bid many men farewell who I didn’t think I would have the chance to see before I left in the morning, and greeted a wave of watchmen who were just now returning from their duties. Word had spread that I was here, so none were surprised by me except for those who had been up I Dragonsreach where the gossip had not yet reached.  
  
Among those coming down from the castle was the man himself. Arvid. Seeing him alive and well made me glowingly happy, and also livid as a slaughterfish in a stewpot. On the one hand, he had bid me to escape during the battle, and certainly saved my life. On the other, he was a traitor to the empire, a scoundrel for turning his loyalty to the Stormcloaks, and a damn fool for promising me a cart outside the city where there had been nothing.  
  
He pulled his helmet off as soon as he entered, showing off hair that had once been cropped short like an Imperial Legionnaire, and was now being grown out to suit the more rugged fashion of his Nord heritage and allegiance. He was still handsome, despite a cruel scar that stretched clear across his right cheek and over the edge of his jaw.  
  
Finding me upon opening the door, Arvid was staggered before my presence seemed to click in his mind, and he rushed forward to meet me.  
  
Arvid threw his arms around me, swung me around, and was met with a chorus of cheers. Was he really such a hero? Had his valiant act of betrayal in the war really won him so much approval? He was also the guard who had laid the final blow on the dragon during the fight I’d partaken in, so perhaps it was a matter of him building a reputation around that. And, if he was Sinmir’s right-hand-man and a royal guard, he might have been earning true celebrity among the guards and the people. But there was something more. I tried to listen to the men around, to hear what they were saying as the prodigal guard said a breathless hello in my ear.  
  
When he finally pulled away from me, the room went quiet. Something was happening. I tried to look around, to get clues from the anxiously watching and listening men, but Arvid turned my face back, demanding my full attention.  
  
“I told you I would be holding my breath until I saw you again,” he said. “Ask anyone, I’ve been blue in the face for months.”  
  
I forced out an uncomfortable laugh. No one else was laughing. They all just sat there, silent, watching. Waiting. I got the terrible impression that Arvid had become a vampire and was about to bite my larynx out.  
  
His crystalline blue eyes looked down nervously, and I remembered him not as the damn idiot who conspired against his jarl to get Whiterun into Ulfric’s hands, but as my favorite guard who walked me home every evening, pretending to be avidly interested in potions just so he could hear me ramble about lavender and spider eggs. He saved my life by telling me to run, and I saved his with a dragon at my back.  
  
A gauntlet-clad hand reached up to, I thought, pat my shoulder. Instead, he clutched something, and with a shock I glanced down to see what he was holding.  
  
My amulet of Mara, still around my neck, was sitting in his open palm. “I knew you would come back to be with me,” he said. “Does this mean you’re ready to get married?”  
  
Shit, by the Eight and Talos and all the Daedra and everything else that would strike me down! He could have bashed me in the read with a rock, and I’d have been less dumbfounded.  
  
It took too long to remember how to speak. I was much too distracted by the burning heat in my cheeks and the feeling of two dozen eyes searing holes into me expectantly.  
  
“N-no, I’m not looking to get married,” I stammered. “I’m a priest!”  
  
It wasn’t quite true yet, but it was the best answer I could give to explain wearing such a thing in few enough words to get it out of my mouth before the stress made blood pour out of my nose.  
  
If I had thought it was quiet before, now I could hear every awkward fidget of every man in the room. Even from far up at the height of the Wind District, the sound of a hammer banging up at the Skyforge echoed through the room. Eyes glanced down, or around, trying to avoid eye contact, or else they were directly on me with mouths agape. It seemed that everyone was at least equally embarrassed, and for a long time we all stood in agonizing stillness. I heard, far in the back of the building where the cots were, someone make a shushing noise, and someone else whisper, “I can’t believe it!”  
  
“O-oh,” Arvid choked, taking a small step away from me. “I… thought when you came back you would… ah…” He cleared his throat and ran a hand over his furiously blushing face. “When did you become a, uh,  _priest_?”  
  
“A few days ago,” I answered, this time a little more honestly. “I know, it was a quick decision but… I went through a lot. Mara herself has intervened in my life, and the Priests in Riften were told by her to send me on a pilgrimage. That’s actually why I’m here. I’m headed to Dawnstar, where I’ll serve the Lady on my first quest in her name.”  
  
The explanation did nothing to alleviate the thick atmosphere of embarrassment and awkwardness from the barracks. I excused myself, leaving a whole room full of confused guards and a heartbroken Arvid behind me.  
  
I wanted to go to Jorrvaskr before the night was done, to find the big Companion I’d danced with, but I knew that would only lead to more embarrassment. He was one of two twins, and I had never found out which it was who I had danced with. But the memory of his strong arms holding me under the Gildergreen had left a deep impression on me, and I often recalled those happy moments since I’d been away.  
  
But what good would it do, really? I had once imagined that I might have married him, but I already broke one man’s heart today, and I knew that my mission and my new direction on the path of priesthood wouldn’t allow the deviation from my quest or the cruelty to these men in leading them on. And, when I thought too hard about a man’s hands holding me, his face had a way of turning into Thrynn.  
  
No point, I decided, and I went back to the Huntsman.  
  
Arcadia and Elrindir weren’t friends, exactly, but while I was briefly in town, they were happy to spend the evening together to share my company. We chatted late into the night, and I confessed the horrible scene that had played out in the barracks.  
  
“You could do worse,” Arcadia pointed out. “Everyone knows he’s being groomed to be the next captain of the guard.”  
  
“He’s a Stormcloak,” I said. “The only worse I could do is marrying Ulfric himself.”  
  
Arcadia, a true Imperial, shivered distastefully at the thought and flinched her brown eyes shut. “Fair point.”  
  
But Elrindir gave me a proud lift of his ale. “It will do him well to be put in his place a little. He’s been strutting around like a jarl since Sinmir started puffing up his ego. But you were very fond of him, weren’t you?”  
  
Once, I thought with a sigh. “A lot changed when he told me his little plan while I was in the dungeon.”  
  
“But what made him act was the order to give you over to the Thalmor,” Elrindir offered helpfully. “That must count for something.”  
  
“It would count for more if desiring my safety inspired good qualities in him. But, if a man in dire straits resorts to treason over true heroism, he can’t very well be praised as a hero.”  
  
Both of my friends went quiet, until Arcadia murmured, “I can’t tell if you sound like a priest, or like a woman with her standards too high.”  
  
That made me laugh. “It must be the former! I’ve had one lover since coming to Skyrim, and he was a member of the thieves guild who chopped his old boss’s head off!”  
  
Once again, I was the only one laughing.   
  
“ _Brina_! Keep your voice down! If anyone hears that, do you know how much harder it will be to get a  _proper_  man in Whiterun to marry you!” Arcadia scolded like a true mother hen. “What were you thinking, getting involved with someone like that! Is that where you got all of those bruises? I should send some companions to take care of him! Farkas would take that job without a fee, I would bet you!”  
  
“No, he never did anything to hurt me!” I insisted, a bit too defensively, maybe. “He didn’t even know I was leaving. Listen, when I left Riften, it was because I had to, not because I wanted to. If I’d had my way, I probably would have made a home there. Probably with Thrynn, if he’d have me. And I was happy. But there was a bit of… I have no idea what actually happened, but suddenly the guild wanted me gone. It was difficult and painful, and Thrynn was the most painful thing that I had to leave behind. His past was violent, and his present was unlawful to say the least, but he treated me like royalty, and all the rest of the guild made me feel like I belonged.”  
  
Elrindir turned himself completely away in a small gesture of defeat. This was between the women, and he had nothing good he could say to alleviate my rapidly rising emotions, save for passing another bottle of ale my way.  
  
“I didn’t realize you were in love,” Arcadia muttered.  
  
“I don’t think I was in love just yet. But I was definitely mid-fall when I had to leave.”  
  
She ran her blisterwort-stained fingertips through my hair and then patted my back until I felt very much like a child being wound down from a tantrum. I looked up at the ceiling, counted the planks of wood and held my breath, just like Big Brother taught me when I was little to keep from crying.  
  
“You know, Farkas still is single,” Arcadia said. “And it’s not as though priests of Mara aren’t allowed to marry. I can see why you might be hesitant about Arvid, after everything that happened, but you could still settle down here.”  
  
“The… Companion?” I asked tentatively. I would think about someone else. A distraction was just what I needed to get all of this depressing muck out of my head.  
  
“Yes,” Elrindir said over his mug of ale. “You remember. He’s one of the twins.”  
  
Arcadia read my strained silence with an exasperated sigh and a roll of her eyes. “The big one! He told Arvid off so that he could dance with you. Not very smart, but he’s an important man in the Companions.”  
  
Well, now I knew his name. It was about time, but there wasn’t much I could do with that information anyway. I couldn’t just turn Arvid down and go after a new man right after, and I did have my quest to focus on, and I just couldn’t stop imagining Thrynn’s reaction if he ever found out that I was with another man.  
  
In fact, just thinking of what he would have done to Arvid, if he’d been there when Arvid proposed to me, made me flinch. Arvid would have lost a lot more than some teeth.  
  
I made a point to change the subject after that, to focus on happier things, like the samples of scaly pholiota I’d brought from the Rift for Arcadia, or the influx of business the Hunstman had been getting lately. I didn’t want to talk about men, or Thrynn, or Riften, or the battle or Windhelm. I just wanted some chatter about trivial little things with the people I loved, and thankfully, they got the hint well enough.  
  
I slept in Anoriath’s old bed, across the room from Elrindir. Despite how uncomfortable it should have made me, I slept soundly and, once again, without nightmares. The woody smell of Anoriath hung in the air around me, drawing peaceful dreams of exotic jungles and winds full of spices.  
  
Though I had been meaning to leave first thing in the morning, such would not be the case. I was dressed in Suvaris’s dress again, since I didn’t want to get my grey outfit too dirty on the road, and I wore my goldenrod robes over it, and Missus Loreius’s cloak over the very top of that. While I already felt bundled quite well, I got tisks of disapproval from Elrindir.  
  
“That’s not a cloak,” he said. “I can see through it.”  
  
It had been through a lot, I supposed. But I was too attached to it to give it up no matter how many tears or patches dotted its surface.  
  
To my surprise, Elrindir then pulled a pack out from behind the counter, full of many of the things Anoriath had when going out to hunt for several days at a time in the winter. Tightly bundled was a fur cloak and a small tent made out of hide, as well as a compact bedroll. This was the best equipment I had ever traveled with. In fact, I never even owned a tent before! I was speechless as he passed it over the counter to me  
  
“I don’t go out to hunt these days, since I have to look after this old place, and I’m sure Anoriath wouldn’t have wanted all this things just collecting dust when you have use for them. Now, the hide tent won’t be very helpful in the snow up north, but it’s better than nothing. The fur should do you nicely.”  
  
It was heavy, and far, far more than I was accustomed to carrying, but I certainly didn’t want another experience like my road to Windhelm when I had the constant fear of hypothermia and frostbite. I thanked Elrindir, kissed him on the cheek, and promised I would bring it all back in good condition one day.  
  
At the gate, I bid Arcadia and Elrindir goodbye, but was caught off-guard at the flock of guards who were also at there to see me off. Among them, Arvid, apparently with his pride recovered, gave me a kiss on my forehead like he used to and whispered in my ear, “I won’t give up on you, Brina.”  
  
A threat if I’d ever heard one, but I smiled and wished him well and turned my back on Whiterun once more, this time on terms that would not haunt me.  
  
Maramal and Dinya were right. This journey was healing my heart one wound at a time. All the fear and pain I’d carried with me from this city was resolved, and little by little I could feel the weight lifting from chest.  
  
  
_25th of Rain’s Hand,_  
Dear Big Brother,  
  
_I don’t know how you travel so easily. You’ve been across the province over and over._  
  
_It’s been hard being on the road again, with so little time to rest my perpetually injured leg. I didn’t see Danica before leaving Whiterun, so every step aches and I’ve been moving much slower that I would have liked. This time, though, I’m better equipped. I’m wearing Missus Loreius’s cloak until I get to the snow regions, and I’ll have a lush fur cape to keep me warm then. I can’t even tell you how excited I am to have a bedroll to sleep on, under a tent, beside a toasty fire!_  
  
_I’m not without my regrets and my sadness, but piece by piece I’m locking it away in an iron-clad chest somewhere far behind my heart. I never want to forget the experiences I’ve had, good and bad, or the people I’ve met; what I do want is to be able to look at those experiences without wanting to cry, or to feel like my past is a ghost always standing just at the corner of my peripherals so that I cannot be free of it._  
  
_And somewhere, you must be out there with a past of your own. In all these years, Brother, how many people have you said goodbye to? How many people have you seen die, and how many do you wish you could have saved? Do you think of home? Do you lay awake worrying about the future? Are you haunted by the echoes of the past that continue to resound through the corridors of time?_  
  
  
My pace was slow after my long walk from Riften to Whiterun, and I was making rather poor time. Going the long way around the city from the front gate and following the road moving very slowly meant that I was reaching Whitewatch Tower in the afternoon. Guards were milling around like bees around a hive, and directly in front of the tower was a group of men who I assumed to be off-duty guards. They all wore ordinary clothes and held bottles of mead, frequently holding them up to cheer for one thing or another. Maybe just the fact that they weren’t currently working and, being stationed far enough from the captain of the hold’s guard, were allowed to enjoy their downtime a bit more rowdily than they would have otherwise was reason enough to celebrate.  
  
The three men, clearly intoxicated and very much enjoying themselves, called me over as I approached.  
  
“Hail, friend!” the nearest one called. “It's good to see another merry soul enjoying this fine day. Ah, but you look tired. Come, share a bottle of Honningbrew mead with me!” He held up an unopened bottle, waving it in the air as though coaxing a dog with a fresh chunk of meat.  
  
The label on the bottle turned my lips upward into a proud little grin. The classic label featuring a beehive was adorned with a border of bunches of berries.  
  
“Is that juniper mead?” I asked, even feeling my face get warm as I spoke. “You know, I was the one who created the recipe for Honningbrew’s juniper mead! I’m glad they’re still using my recipe, even after Mallus took over the place.” Malice-Mallus, he could just rot in Oblivion.  
  
“Ysmir’s beard!” he exclaimed, and the others with him perked up. “One after my own heart! A lady who enjoys mead, and could brew me a true Honningbrew! If you weren’t a servant of Mara, I’d insist on sharing a drink with you!”  
  
Mara may have, in her own way, urged me to leave the thieves guild, to become a priest, and to go to this pilgrimage. And yes, living soberly is one of her highest commandments, but if it really mattered to her that much, she’d tell me to knock it off, right? Right! With that in mind, I reached out and gladly took a bottle of my prize recipe, stating, “Mara and I have an understanding.”  
  
The break was a relief, and I spent about an hour chatting with the revelers, telling them about working in the meadery and the ale Arcadia and I had brewed together, which they were greatly impressed by.  
  
“I might go to the temples more, if this is what I can expect!” one of them joked.  
  
“You really are just as fun as Sam said you’d be,” the other added, clapping my shoulder.  
  
My blood ran cold right about then. “Sam?”  
  
“Sam Guevenne! He came down the road before you did. Told us all to seize the day, live a little, and it sounded like as good a reason as any to enjoy the weather and drink the night away!” It wasn’t even close to night yet, I should add.  
  
“Yes, that’s usually how things go when he’s around,” I said, glancing over my shoulder. I was on a mission, and I really didn’t need to be waking up anyplace strange. “He isn’t still here, is he?”  
  
The three men looked around and seemed to agree that he must have left when no one was looking. “Could’ve sworn he was right with us…”  
  
“Well, that’s a shame,” I said, only half meaning it. Really, I did have a wonderful time whenever he was around, and I knew that there was something peculiar and special about him, but I couldn’t afford to be sidetracked. “If he comes back, give him my regards.”  
  
Just in case he really was still nearby, I left immediately after that with well wishes from the revelers, and could soon see the Loreius farm ahead of me. The windmill at the front of their farm still whirled lazily, and it was a short walk up the path to stand before their little home. Was I the last person to have entered? Had no one else thought twice about the overgrown field, or the sagging roof, and wondered what became of the family?  
  
I wouldn’t dream of opening the place back up, since I was certain that the mess I’d left behind once would still be there, only more decomposed. But I did kneel outside the door, prayed to Arkay and Mara for them, and then made myself up a bed in the shelter provided by their mill. I helped myself to a few vegetables that were now growing wildly in their small plot of land, and left early in the morning. I hovered near their door for a few minutes, rolling Missus Loreius’s cloak in my hands. After several attempts to hang it on the door, I finally allowed myself to roll it up and stuff it in my pack with a lowering of my head. In my care, the thing had gone from well-worn to threadbare, with several spots showing burns and tears. The bottom was soiled with the red clay of Eastmarch, the soft loam of the Rift, and the coarse, rocky dirt of Whiterun. Though I never knew Missus Loreius, I would like to imagine that, seeing the battered old rag in my hands, she would have told me just to keep it.   
  
The calmer season meant that I wasn’t wading through a blizzard, but snow still fell in twirling flurries that stuck on Anoriath’s old fur cloak in a fluffy white blanket as I walked further north. The transition from Whiterun Hold to the Pale was shockingly abrupt; within a couple of hours of leaving the perfectly temperate farm, I was stomping right back into winter.  
  
Hooking west with the meandering road toward Dawnstar, a few black stalks rising from the white got my attention before I approached. I skittered behind an obliging tree to catch a glimpse of the scene unfolding before me, before I accidentally blundered into another disaster as I was so prone to doing.  
  
Ancient stones were falling apart from their ritualistic construction of what appeared to be a sort of worship space. In the center, two long, dark figures swayed with thinly-veiled nervousness, while two others were on the side closest to me, bickering while one observed a part of the shrine.  
  
“We do not have time to see to its destruction,” one shrill female voice barked. “I shall send an order for a proper Justiciar to dispose of it. However, I must  _insist_  that dismantling the Tower of Talos is not our mission, nor have we been in any way instructed to divert our attention to such matters. The shrine shall be reported so that an available agent can destroy it.”  
  
I swayed slowly, peering between the twigs of the snowberry bush in front of my tree to get a better look at who was speaking. In order to keep from squeaking in terror, I sucked in my breath. It was her, the tall Thalmor woman who had been chasing after me in the wreckage of Whiterun. I could finally see her features clearly, including two large, emerald eyes and a face so gaunt and extreme that she must have been stunning by Altmer standards. Beside her was a man, dressed in the same long black robes. He wore no hood over his face, and simply allowed the flakes of snow to collect on the thick mane of stark-white hair that grew wildly down past his shoulders and over his back. A very thin goatee accentuated the snake-like smile on his face.  
  
“Deactivation of the Towers is always of primary concern. Where Talos worship is found, it is our obligation and privilege to destroy it,” he answered. His speech was peculiarly sharp, with the vowels being short or dramatically held and every consonant quick and biting. “Justiciars or not, Zenotha,” he said, making the female next to him go rigid with the use of her given name, sans any formal title, “we cannot let this remain.”  
  
“You shall address me as Commander,  _scholar_ , and remember your place,” Zenotha snapped. “Also, remember that we are on a very delicate mission.”  
  
“Oh, I know our mission well,” the scholar answered in a chuckle. “It was you who failed to see your mission for all that it was, and failed in your first several months. That is why I was put in charge  _with you_  to see this through, is it not? Now, Zenotha, my  _partner_ , why don’t you relax, help me to destroy this relic, and we may continue on our way.”  
  
The two behind them continued to stand, at quasi-attention while their superiors hissed back and forth like angry cats. Unable or unwilling to take sides, I watched as they seemed to keep their bodies turned more toward the man. It wasn’t a subtle gesture of support or respect; something about the curve of their shoulders and the way they seemed to jump ever so slightly told volumes. It wasn’t just that they were watching the two people in charge of their mission argue that made them nervous—the scholar himself was a source of anxiety to the lower-ranked soldiers. An air of distrust hovered between him and all three of his companions.  
  
And something about his movements, the shortness of them and the suddenness of every muscle contraction, and the unnatural intensity in his yellow eyes reminded me of a certain jester I had met a long time ago. That realization sent a bone-chilling shiver down my spine. He was a dangerous, unpredictable mage that made even fellow Thalmor apprehensive. And he was chasing after me.  
  
“She may already be in Dawnstar by now!” Zenotha said.  
  
“There is so much more to it than just  _catching_  her!” the scholar scolded. “That is what you continuously fail to see. You are no longer just hunting for the sister of one of the Thalmor’s enemies. You are searching for a girl who is, in her own right, immensely valuable.”  
  
“With these constant distractions, I would almost think you wanted her to get away!”  
  
Though he was turned away from Zenotha, and had shown no signs of seeing me, I could swear I saw him wink. “Of course not! Who knows what she may yet become, if left to her own devices!”


	16. In Which She Meets the Scholar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Having left Riften and her life in the Thieves Guild behind against her will, Brina is on her way to Dawnstar on a mission from Mara. But shortly into the last leg of her journey, she realized that she has a troupe of Thalmor on her tail.
> 
> Now, just a short way from Dawnstar, Brina finds herself distracted by an old acquaintance and a new enemy.

### Chapter Sixteen

No amount of pain in my leg could have made me run slower after I’d hurriedly drank the white vial of invisibility potion I had and cast a muffling spell over myself in order to get away from the Thalmor without detection. I ran until my lungs burned and my legs felt like they would give way beneath my every unstable gallop, and only paused to quiet my protesting body with a heavy gulp of stamina potion.  
  
I ran through what was left of the day, collapsing when the sky started to darken and I could go no further. I went well away from the road to pitch my tent up, where I could keep an eye on the road to the south where the Thalmor were and the road to the north where the trail disappeared into the unwelcoming jaws of a tall wooden fence of a fortress of questionable contents.  
  
Sleeping was difficult since I wouldn’t give up my position by starting a fire and the fear of being ambushed from either side kept my heart pounding long after I’d snuggled underneath my fur.  
  
Long past midnight, my fluttering eyelids were jolted wide by a shout and a clatter of steel that rang over the snowdrifts to me. Tentatively, I peeked out of the flap of the tent to see the fort alive with activity. In the light cast by torches along the battlements, I could see silhouettes darting around, but was too far to see exactly what was going on. Someone’s familiar voice caught my ear, hollering in the distance, and before I could convince myself of what a horrible idea this was, I was abandoning my tent to run on throbbing legs toward the fortress.  
  
The bandits who inhabited the place were all up in arms and easily distinguishable by their rough studded and leather armors. Those clearing out the bandit-infested fortress, however, mercenaries probably sent by the jarl of the Pale, were far better equipped with armors of fine make that glimmered majestically even in the dim fiery glow.  
  
I ran into the fenced area and made my way to the stone arch that opened to an enclosed bailey where it appeared the fight had moved to, where right at my feet were two fallen men. A ghostly pale Breton who wore expertly crafted glass armor was the one who I knelt beside to heal first.  
  
Up above me on the wall, I could see the man whose voice beckoned me out of my (relatively) safe campsite. Though trying desperately to keep my eyes on my current patient, the ringing of metals and the scuffle of feet always turned my gaze upward in equal parts bewilderment and fear.  
  
On either side of him on the top of the wall, a bandit brandished iron blades. Between them, hooting at his luck of two fresh competitors, Olev spun his axe in a figure-eight in front of and behind his body, turning it over in his hand with such an innate feel for the weight and balance of the weapon that it might have been attached to him. When the bandit behind him too advantage of his positioning, the mercenary turned with a swiftness hardly expected of a man so bulky, fully covered with ebony armor. The axe in his hands whooshed upward in a mighty slash that went diagonally across the bandit’s body, trapping the bandit’s sword midswing between the hook and shoulder of the axe. A moment later, after following through to the extent of the Olev’s reach, the sword was completely tugged from the bandit’s hand and flung over the wall, far out into the wilderness.  
  
Now facing a defenseless foe, the mighty mercenary did not try to stop the inertia he had built with his swing. Instead, Olev turned his whole body to keep the arc going, leading the axe back downward so that, as he completed the spin, it was neck-level with the second bandit. He was turned back toward the swordless bandit before the man now behind him crumbled.  
  
Against my better judgment, I admit I screamed when the dismembered head dropped to the ground beside me.  
  
Up above, Olev was pressing forward, driving his unarmed opponent back on his heels. Now facing very little threat, his axe swung in a slow, simple back-and-forth routine, practically handing the poor fool a chance to run for his life.  
  
The bandit, preposterously brave considering his odds at survival, ran back but never turned his back on the monstrous mercenary swinging away. He skipped backward until he reached the site of an earlier skirmish, where he risked dropping down to pick up a discarded greatsword from a fallen warrior’s hand.  
  
Just like that, Olev quit his merciful game and brought his axe in hard, driving it forward in a flurry of small swings that forced the bandit to pause to find any openings that lasted long enough to get his sword in—that is, if his sword weren’t completely occupied just blocking the furious blows.  
  
As Olev continued to drive his opponent back, the bandit began to step backward with more and more confidence. No doubt more experienced with the layout of the fortress, he knew where to lead the invading mercenary until he could take advantage of a better positioning. A narrow stone bridge that arched over the bailey presented him with just such an opportunity. He brought the mercenary along with him, onto the snow-slicked bridge where, as he reached the crest, he stood just a bit above the mercenary.  
  
Getting his footing on the new slope would have been simple enough for the battle-drunk Nord mercenary, but that combined with his new vulnerability to the archer down in the bailey below and the bandit in front of him who was now slashing downward from his higher position rendered Olev, understandably, overwhelmed. My eyes were forced away from him right as his balance came undone and his body swayed right.  
  
I hated to get involved in the fight itself, and I’d have been thrilled to just use the opportunity to heal the mercenary contenders, but the mercenary on the bridge was one arrow away from disaster. A spear of ice formed in my hand and was propelled by a single mental command and a shove of magicka to sing through the air and find home in the bandit archer’s shoulder. The force alone threw him to the ground, and the wound itself would effectively put an end to his days as a bowman, while hopefully not being lethal in the end. I didn’t want to kill him, after all.  
  
My scream earlier, and now my attack on the archer, was earning me the attention of a few bandits in the yard. Three of them turned on me, but one was instantly intercepted by a mace that crushed his face to a bloody mess of cartilage and bone. The other two ran for me with weapons held at the ready and muscles coiled, ready to take my head off my shoulders.  
  
The archer, from his place on the ground, revealed himself to be in a position of authority when he screamed out in livid agony, “You keep that cunt alive! She’s mine!” and was met with two solemn barks of understanding.  
  
My place beside the wounded mercenary was vacated, though I was satisfied to see the fallen warrior grunt and begin to pick himself back up before I was forced to look away from him as well.  
  
I ran out of the bailey, toward the smaller yard enclosed by the sturdy log walls where no one remained but bodies. From here, I felt more confident making my stand, where I could get the bandits to bottleneck at the stone arch. They came through, one after the other, but were perfectly aligned in the narrow opening that a succession of fireballs launched their way inevitably caught both of my pursuers aflame. For a split moment, I was swooning from the wave of nausea I felt at harming-- _killing_ \--these men; sympathy doesn’t last long when an archer is threatening to violate you with a sword over the roar of his comrades on fire, though.  
  
Utterly determined, one of them continued to lunge at me despite being shrouded in flames beckoned from Aetherius. His sword, glowing red from the heat I had inflicted upon it, chopped down at my shoulder and made it through my fur cloak and into the flesh of my left arm.  
  
Howling in pain didn’t do me much good, but for a moment it was all I could remember how to do. I shrieked in agony, but reminded myself that the wound wouldn’t be so bad, since the blade itself was hot enough to cauterize it. I wouldn’t bleed out, and I could heal myself when this was over, if only I could keep my composure and remember how to cast a damn spell again.  
  
No matter how much you tell yourself a wound isn’t  _that_  bad, though, it’s hard to ignore the shooting pain down a limb or your vision going spotty. Still reeling from the blow when he flexed for another swing, I threw my hand up with a ward to give me just enough time to recover. My free hand ripped a vial from my bandolier, and the mouthful of putrid oil revitalized me body and mind. Garlic, Namira’s rot, and half a handful of salt is never pleasant to gulp down, with or without a flaming bandit slinging curses and beating against your ward. The potion immediately began to relieve the pain in my shoulder and send my skin itching with energy, so I dropped the ward in favor of two handfuls of wildly sparking lightning.  
  
Not only did a thrust of my hands and a jolt of electricity put an end to his chopping at me, it landed him a safe distance up, over the yard and onto the upper ledge.  
  
I hadn’t been able to see until just now, but coming up behind the bandit I had been engaged in was another man, advancing like a wolf toward a rabbit.  
  
I shot out more lightning, and other than a few uncomfortable twitches, he powered through it.  
  
One of the many horrible things about being in fights is that you can win a hundred battles, but you only get to lose once. A hundred attacks can be parried, a hundred spells properly fired, a hundred slashes that hit home, but your enemy only needs one.  
  
I thought about Olev, who’d been wobbling on the brigde, and prayed his one wasn’t up yet.  
  
I released a burst of flames at the bandit coming at me, and followed it up by a barrage of ice that pelted him like sharpened hail. He stumbled backward and lifted his sword in a futile attempt to protect himself, but one more jolt of electricity was all he needed to topple on his back with a dull  _thud_  of impact.  
  
Now free of that distraction, and sorely hoping no others would present themselves, I rushed back into the main bailey and looked to the bridge on the upper level—and saw just the crumpled body of the bandit. There, on the ground below, was the mercenary, cradling a leg.  
  
“Damn it, Olev, when you said you were bound to get a scar every now and then, I didn’t realize that was your excuse for getting injured in every damn fight!” I scolded when I dropped to my knees beside him.  
  
“What in Oblivion are you doing out here?” he asked. I batted his hands away from his leg and started radiating healing energy through to him as he continued, “Don’t tell me your brother is one of the bandits and you’re going to tell me to go home now.”  
  
“He’d better not be a bandit, or I’ll box his ears,” I said. “Can you stand?”  
  
Olev hopped to his feet and bounced a bit to check. “Good as new. It wasn’t so bad to begin with, though.” In a swift sweep of his long arms, I was caught in the big Nord’s hug with such suddenness that I yelped like a fox in one of Anoriath’s traps. “I owe you a lot, Brina. And not just money, because I definitely owe you that, too!”  
  
“You’re just lucky that I changed my mind about giving you a second of that scar on your face,” I said, pointing through the slit in his helm to the angry red gash that I could barely see cutting its way between Olev’s blue eyes. “Your sense of humor really needs work.”  
  
“What? I thought I was hilarious. Especially about the part where you could sleep with me to owe me less! Unless you changed your mind, in which case it wasn’t a joke at all and I will gladly accept your apology for refusing and punching me as soon as we find a bed sturdy enough.”  
  
“I’ll punch you again.”  
  
“It’s like a kitten threatening to bat my nose! You stay outside of the fort; I need to go inside and see if the others have cleared it out yet. Battle’s not won until every bandit lies dead,” Olev said. Then, calling me by a name I didn’t remember telling him, he said, “I’ll be back for you soon, Stone-Cat.”  
  
I took his advice and started out, but in the faint light of the torches I could see movement in the direction of my tent.  
  
Had the Thalmor found it? What would they assume when they didn’t see me? My blood went cold to imagine their progression of thought. A bandit-infested fort right down the road would be the obvious next stop.  
  
Alright, so I got to enjoy the tent less than one night before abandoning it completely. It was a loss, but worth it to avoid conflict with the Thalmor.  
  
I turned right around, meaning to go through the fort and just find a place to hide where Olev could find me when he came back out again. As I turned, I bumped hard into a tall, glowering form of a man with one arm limp at his side, covered in blood, and the other hand lashing out toward my neck before I could scream. The man who had said he wanted me alive was not yet dead himself.  
  
I just wished people would stop strangling me. I was still sore from Dirge’s iron grip around my throat.  
  
A rough shove against my neck choked off any attempt at calling for help I may have had, and as I shuffled to regain my senses, the bandit archer throttled me to the ground.  
  
On my back, thrashing wildly, I felt a dagger pierce my side. An elbow going over my windpipe limited me to rasping out a hazy ghost of a scream. The slick surface of the metal was poisoned with what I quickly deduced by my dwindling magicka as a hanging moss and glow dust concoction.  
  
I tried to struggle against the man, but his knees pinned my arms and he sat across my hips.  
  
“I don’t know whether I should gut you, fuck you, or cut you apart so you can die slowly,” he said through blackened teeth. “Never got to defile and kill a priest—I’ll be sure to make the most out of it, bitch.”  
  
Was he that confident that the bandits still inside could take out the rest of the mercenaries, or did he no longer care who won the battle as long as he had his defeat over me?  
  
“Olev!” I tried to yell, but my voice was barely loud enough for escape my own lips.  
  
The bandit flipped me to my stomach, forcing my face into the frozen dirt while my arms flailed uselessly to find some purchase on my attacker. I felt my priest robes and Suvaris’s dress beneath them lift over my waist and the frigid air hit my skin.  
  
Instead of swiping at him, I tried to push up from the ground with my arms and legs, but even with one of his arms badly wounded, he was still too strong for me. My feet and the heels of my hands dug into the icy ground, but it was all for nothing when I felt a press of flesh at my backside.  
  
I screamed, but in my state, it only came out as an agonized wheeze.  
  
A flash of light above me and the sensation of the man behind me being thrown made me roll to my back.  
  
He skipped across the ground like a stone, smoke rising from his body. I turned to see what had hit him, and at the opening that I had tried to leave through, there stood a tall figure in long black robes with wild white hair and a staff held aloft in one hand, still steaming on the end.  
  
Out of the pan and into the fire, I suppose.  
  
“Don’t move,” he said. “You’ve been stabbed with a poisoned dagger, and if the others accompanying me get a good look at you, you’re as good as caught.”  
  
Obediently, or perhaps to frightened and in pain to object, I laid flat on my back as the Altmer approached me. He knelt down with me, tugged my skirts back down respectfully, and waved a hand full of gleaming yellow light over my side. “Did he…?”  
  
“N…no…” I whimpered. “He was right about to… I felt him…”  
  
“Well, he’s perfectly dead now, I assure you.” With his voice lowered, he sounded far more melodic and less manic than I remembered him sounding before.  
  
“You’re trying to capture me.”  
  
“ _They_  are trying to capture you,” he corrected. “But they wouldn’t know what to do with you if they caught you. They don’t understand that your significance is far greater than a mere hostage with the Dragonborn. And your full usefulness is not yet unlocked. To capture you now would be a waste of too many opportunities.” The scholar gave me a half-smile. “They asked me for my advice, and I, knowing things they couldn’t possibly understand, insisted on taking over the operation to prevent their success. Until the time is right.”  
  
“And what time is that?” I asked hoarsely.  
  
“I can’t very well tell you that, can I?” he said, and his face became that crazed visage I had glimpsed at the shrine of Talos. Eyes widened and teeth shone like he would snap out for a bite of me any moment. “There is much work to be done, by both of us.”  
  
Yes, he was insane, whether he saved my life or not.  
  
“I don’t know what you mean,” I whispered.  
  
“The Towers are all falling, and soon, the Altmer will be restored as et’Ada. All other life originating after Covention shall be nullified,” he told me matter-of-factly. “But that is a long way yet. You need not fear it. I will let you know what is coming and what you must do when the time comes, and where you shall fit in in the aftermath. You, my dear, are my key to supremacy.”  
  
Okay, so he did want to capture me… before some sort of apocalypse. I couldn’t tell if I was thankful that he was determined to keep his colleagues from failing, or dreading the fact that the one Thalmor on my side was a complete and utter lunatic. What good could I be? And who in all of oblivion would give him that sort of mad idea to begin with? How could a group like the Thalmor let someone so clearly touched by Sheogorath have any kind of power? “So… you’re going to let me go?”  
  
He reached down, grabbed me by my upper arms and pulled me to my feet. “Hide. I shall misdirect the others.”  
  
“You’re the only reason they haven’t caught me yet, aren’t you?” I asked. The thought that his strange scheme was the only reason I retained my freedom was terrifying and made me feel incredibly small and weak. Having almost just been raped, I felt helpless and powerless indeed. Where was Olev? I so desperately needed someone I could trust to comfort me!  
  
“They do not need my help to be bumbling, incompetent fools,” the scholar said dismissively. Scholar of what? I thought. Could madmen even be scholars? “They have gotten themselves lost and misled on their own several times, but I have done my part in promoting such idiocy to better ensure your continuous escape.”  
  
“I… I need to find my friend,” I stuttered. My whole body felt wrong and violated, and a great big Nord who owed me big sounded like an ideal person to hide behind for a while.  
  
The Altmer gave a cordial wave. “It was a pleasure to finally speak with you, Miss Brina Valus. Until next time.”  
  
I would find a way to make sure there never, ever was a next time, I promised myself as I scurried away from him and through the large wooden door into the fort proper.  
  
“Olev!” I screamed as soon as the door slammed shut behind me. A flight of stairs descended directly in front of me, so I nearly leapt down to the bottom, stumbling just a moment before barreling headfirst into the dark stone corridor.  
  
A bandit leaning against the wall pushed himself up, one hand clenched against a profusely bleeding lesion beneath his collarbone. His free hand clutched a dagger shakily, but he barely took a threatening step toward me before I fired a stream of electricity from my palm and watched him collapse into the corner of the wall.  
  
I would never enjoy killing. No matter how much I told myself that it was a necessity of living in a dangerous place like Skyrim, or how I reminded myself of the priestess in Windhelm’s comforting reminders that Talos would always support self-defense and never judge or hate me for such violence, I never want to end a person’s life if I don’t have to. When I finally got around to sleeping, I had the sinking feeling that I would be having nightmares worse than when I left Riften. All over my skin felt jittery and dirty.  
  
Damn, I could use a dink about now.  
  
“Olev, where are you?”  
  
I was at the base of a wide tower when I caught someone descending the stairs toward me. The lightning climbing in little arcs like spider webs between my fingers lit up threateningly until I realized that the person coming was a woman, decked out in Orcish armor not typical of the bandit-types.  
  
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” she asked incredulously. “And how do you know Olev?”  
  
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I happened to find out that my friend was, also,” I said, simplifying the story as much as I could.  
  
“You do realize this is a bandit den, right?” she said. Closer and closer, she rattled noisily down the stairs until I could finally see, in the extreme shadows cast by the torches, that the face looking down on me was an Orc. She looked perfectly in her element, covered in rough, battered orichalcum armor and smattered with blood. She would end the night with pleasant dreams after all this mayhem.  
  
“I do. Olev came in here a few minutes ago.” For a moment I went silent so that I could listen for any more clings of metal on metal. By the sounds of it, the fighting had ceased. “Have you cleared this place?”  
  
“Yes. I just about had done it all by myself, but a few of my company are cleaning up what’s left of the mess,” she declared proudly. “I am Urzul gra-Logob, the leader of the Ripwold Shields.”  
  
“Is… is Olev a member?” I asked. When we’d met, he was an independent bounty hunter.  
  
By now, the imposing woman was standing right in front of me. I saw her eyes flash down to the stab wound on my side, and the unpunctured flesh that could be seen in the tear in the clothing where the strange Thalmor had healed me. “He has been with us for a short while. And, as long as he can swing his axe well, he’s welcome.”  
  
Nodding with a hurried murmur to excuse myself, I started to side-step around her to investigate the rest of the tower. I was in the way, clearly, but as long as the fight was ending throughout the fort, I wanted to be with someone I could trust.  
  
He was at the top level of the fort, in a small room lit by a dying fire. Bodies littered the floor in various states of undress, with piles building up along the walls as the mercenaries sorted the loot directly off the rogues’ still-warm bodies. Olev, having removed his ebony helmet, looked just like he did last time, perhaps with his straight hair a bit longer so that it was forced into a crooked part and fell around his cheekbones and jaw. He pulled a leather jerkin off one man, showed off a bloody, gaping hole in the feeble armor, and laughed with another one of the sellswords.  
  
“Not enough to smash his kidney out, Yatur, you had to cut his head off, too?” he was chuckling. The other mercenary, a short and squat, barrel-shaped orc, laughed heartily and flexed.  
  
The whole room, and everything happening within it, only made me feel weaker in the knees. I gasped, “Olev?”  
  
Starting like a cat grabbed from behind, the big Nord warrior turned to me. “I thought I told you to wait outside.”  
  
“I was waiting. And then a bandit who hadn’t been killed held me down and tried to rape me. And then… well, other things happened.” I’d meant to just avoid the whole Thalmor subject, but the vague way that I’d tapered off made Olev’s eyes widen and his nose flare. He reached for his axe, and I hurriedly added, “The bandit is dead, and I’m fine. Got stabbed, but it’s healed now. I just wanted to hide in here. Can I just stay close?”  
  
The bright scarlet scar across his face flushed a red to put the setting sun to shame. “Stay over by the wall. I’ll be done here in a minute.”  
  
I went out of the room and curled up against the outermost wall for what felt like an hour. I heard quiet talking in the room, and what sounded like taunts every few minutes.  
  
After the rustling of the division of loot was finished, a female voice joined those in the room, and then it wasn’t just Olev who knelt beside me, but Urzul the leader as well.  
  
Up close, she wasn’t much to look at from a human perspective. Her eyes had a jaundiced hue to them, and were too round, like the eyes of a reptile. Teeth like two little tusks poked out from her moss-colored lips. She had removed her helmet to show off a head of black hair cropped shorter than Olev’s.  
  
“Are you alright, girl? I saw that you had a healed wound under your ribs, but if you’ve been hurt… other than that,” she said leadingly.  
  
At least he had the good grace to have a woman talk to me. Though she hardly looked like a kind, compassionate sort, the fact that she was female did make it considerably easier to talk to her about what happened.  
  
“He didn’t hurt me. He didn’t even get the chance to… He died before he actually raped me. But he got close…” I shivered at just how close he’d gotten, and felt my stomach turn with the all-too-recent memory.  
  
“You shouldn’t have come here. It’s lucky that worse didn’t happen.”  
  
“Worse would have happened if I hadn’t left my camp,” I said. I told them about the Thalmor that had been around my tent, leaving out that the insane one knew exactly where I was and had saved me.  
  
“We’re heading out now,” Urzul told me. “But I’ll send a couple scouts to make sure that the Thalmor are gone, and we’ll get your things for you. Where are you going?”  
  
“Dawnstar.”  
  
I remained there with Olev and Urzul until two Ripwold Shields came up the stairs with my pack and tightly bundled tent in hand, reporting that there were tracks of four people heading off the road to the west, toward something the scouts called the Lord Stone. It would be safe for me to continue on to Dawnstar from here.  
  
“Are you going to stay with her?” Urzul asked Olev, and to my surprise, he didn’t hesitate at all to nod firmly.  
  
“Leaving her alone once was a mistake. I won’t let it happen again.”


	17. In Which She Enters Nightcaller

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Olev challenges Brina's relationship with the Divines, and Erandur supports her desire to become a priest of Mara. Together, Brina and the priest begin their pilgrimage to end the curse on Dawnstar.

### Chapter Seventeen

 _29th of Rain’s Hand,_  
 _Dear Big Brother,_  
  
 _I forgot what it was like to have an older brother. I wish it was you._  
  
  
With a firm insistence that he felt no bother at being separated from the band of mercenaries, Olev came with me to the north. We were about a day and a half from Dawnstar now, and making exceptional time since, whenever I barely limped on my bad leg, Olev hoisted me over his shoulders like a backpack and continued on without slowing. Wolves that drew near were batted away with the blunt side of his axe. When he spotted a white troll prowling in the snow, he gave me calm, confident instructions to pummel it with fire spells. As it ran for me and I was about to panic, Olev came from behind it and finished it with a devastating downward chop.  
  
Not only all of that, but he was a very good sport when I begged to harvest fat from the thing for some potions. He even held the skin open while I collected the lard. Then, he held my hair back while I lost my breakfast.  
  
The only thing he asked for from me was a bit more healing. His fall had been bad, and while my almost-immediate attention saved him a lot of grief, he had just finished with a night-long raid of a whole bandit-ridden fortress. When we finally stopped to set up camp after a long, sleepless day of walking, both of us aching all over from an exciting night and a rough day, I lit a magical inferno to keep him warm while he pulled his armor off. In just a rough spun tunic and trousers, he held his hands out of the tent to keep them nearly in the flames and kept the rest of him in my little tent, covered in his sleeping furs except for whatever part of his body I was currently healing.  
  
My tent was barely big enough for me alone. Between the two of us, there was no privacy or space, but we were also kept comfortably warm. My hands made nicks, cuts, and bruises disappear, but as I brought my hands toward Olev’s face—  
  
“Don’t you touch the scar, Brina,” Olev warned.  
  
“You could actually be handsome if it didn’t look like an Oblivion gate was opening across your face,” I said. To my dismay, he seemed to straighten up with pride at the insult. “It’s not a good thing! I can try to make it at least less prominent.”  
  
“And I said not to touch.” There were absolutely no compromises to be made. He laid down shortly after, snuggling into his furs that were several pelts of many unfortunate animals all sewn together in a morbid patchwork.  
  
I snuggled up beside him; not that I had much choice, since there was otherwise no space to lay, and because his body heat would keep me comfortable through the night.  
  
When I woke, his arms were around me protectively. He made no attempt to change my mind about sleeping with him, though I could tell he’d been hoping, and instead had made the most of the sleeping arrangement by cuddling as best as he could. Which, to be frank, was not good at all. He was all muscle, thick and dense and hard as stone. He was a big man, able to cover me completely if he wanted to, but I felt like a child’s stuffed toy, toeing a fine line between being hugged and wrung in his infinitely stronger arms.  
  
It was a good thing he didn’t try to convince me to sleep with him, since every thought of a man made me think of the bandit archer forcing himself on me the night before. I relived those minutes of helplessness and terror over and over, and thanked the Eight and Talos for the uncomfortable rock-man curled around me protectively. If any man tried to hurt me in front of Olev, he’d cut them down where they stood easy as chopping wood. And I couldn’t help but notice the frequent frowns he cast whenever he thought I wasn’t looking, the eager smiles he wore when he did anything for me, or the glint of guilt that often shone in his eyes. I wasn’t the only one haunted by what the bandit had almost done to me.  
  
On a few occasions, I even tortured myself to wonder about Thrynn. When he was a bandit, would he have--? No, that was a stupid thought. Because he’d had the chance, and he’d sent me away from the bandit den instead. What would he have done to the archer who’d attacked me? Ugh, the moment I wondered, I regretted the impossibly morbid possibilities. He’d lose his ability to mate with anything after Thrynn was through, to say the very least. And that was only if he was merciful. Which… Thrynn was not.  
  
When we’d eaten breakfast and packed up camp, we set off for the last leg of the journey to Dawnstar in the gloomy grey shroud of northern springtime.  
  
“Have you been to Dawnstar?” I asked him from over his shoulder.  
  
He adjusted his hold on me, tossing me just a little bit higher on his back. “A couple of years ago, I worked in one of the mines. Didn’t last. I had the idea that I would get a safe, simple job and live normal for a while, but it was too boring, and didn’t pay nearly as well as being a mercenary.”  
  
“You wanted to settle down?” I chuckled. A quiet, mild-mannered life didn’t seem to fit with this big, scarred mammoth of a man.  
  
“That was the idea. But the work was tedious and boring, the women in the town were nothing to write home about, and I wanted to break the foreman’s arms so bad I accidentally snapped three pickaxes in half just imagining it.” Oh, Gods, he was serious! “But I didn’t. Just left one day, after a couple months of trying to convince myself that I would get used to it.”  
  
“I’m glad you didn’t,” I said, squeezing him around the shoulders. “It’s good to have someone with me.”  
  
“Still looking for that nitwit brother of yours? He should be the one watching out for you out here.”  
  
I shook my head. “I’m looking, just not… actively searching. I’m on my own mission right now. But I haven’t forgotten, and I haven’t given up.”  
  
“Good for you, not wasting all of your time on him. I still think you’d be better off just forgetting about him, though.”  
  
We made it to Dawnstar as the sun was setting. Bitter wind blew off of the icy water and up the hill that the town was situated on. Each citizen walked with a listless gait, slightly swaying like they might fall asleep mid step. Miners wandered through, covered in dirt, with dark circles under their bloodshot eyes. While no one made any rude comments like they did in Windhelm, I felt no more welcome here. A few whispers under breath about “another Imperial in town,” clued me into some other points of animosity they might have had toward me, besides their perpetual exhaustion.  
  
I made sure that my bright priest robes were visible beneath the heavy fur when I asked a passing citizen, “Is there a priest of Mara in town? I was sent to—“  
  
“In the inn,” the miner I stopped grumbled at me before shoving past be brusquely. “’Bout time someone came to help. He’s been less than useless, the stupid knife-ear…”  
  
Olev grabbed me to keep me from toppling sideways, and my arms constricting over his bicep was the only thing that kept him from punching the offender for all the transgressions he’d managed to pack into just a couple of seconds.  
  
“Did I mention that I got into a lot of fights when I lived here?” my big Nord said whilst spitting on the ground. “I must have been thrown out of that inn at least a dozen times for bar fighting…”  
  
“Try to control yourself, then. I’m supposed to be making an impression on a priest here.”  
  
With a rap of his knuckles on my crown effectively making my wild hair even messier than usual, he said, “You may be a good girl, Brina, but somehow I just can’t see you as a priest.”  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, surprised at how offended I was.  
  
He shrugged as he led me back the way we came, which I assumed was the direction of the inn. “It’s a waste. You’re too smart, too pretty, and too talented to be cooping yourself up in a boring old temple. And that’s the least of it—ask me what I think of the Gods. No, I’m serious. Just ask me.”  
  
I rolled my eyes. “What do you know?”  
  
“My father was a priest,” the mercenary answered matter-of-factly. I’d been ready to say something, but that killed any follow-up I could have had. The unlikeliest of upbringings I could have imagined for my tempestuous bully of a man, and he said it like he’d expected me to guess it from the beginning! He took my stunned silence for what it was and gave me a serious look. “Still think I don’t know what I’m talking about? Don’t become a priest. Your devotion has been wasted on your brother long enough already. No point spending your whole life making the same mistake.”  
  
“Your father was a priest? But not anymore?” I said, trying to make sense of the complete lack of proper piety I’d have expected from the child of a holy man. “Did he lose faith? Turn his whole family against the Divines?”  
  
Olev’s blue eyes burned into me, then turned to the snow in front of us. For a moment, I waited for steam to rise from the ice and the dirt below to show through. “Never lost faith, dumb old man.”  
  
“I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t he raise you to revere--?”  
  
“He was a priest of Talos.”  
  
For the second time in as many minutes, I was at a loss for words. “…Oh.”  
  
“The Gods don’t give a fuck about their worshippers. If they do, it’s not enough to move them into action. I don’t care if you think Mara herself stood in front of you and told you to become a priest. The fact of the matter is, when you needed her, when you needed someone to protect you, she wasn’t there. Never will be. You want to know what you should believe in? The one person you can trust above all others, who will never let you down so long as your faith holds true? Yourself. The age of the Gods is over.”  
  
“That was… painfully…”  
  
“Honest?” Olev finished for me. “What can I say? I’m the son of a priest.”  
  
The hot-headedness he’d mentioned earlier was shining through, turning his scar a bright shade of scarlet. Any moment, I was sure, smoke would pour from his ears like a Dwemer contraption. “I’m sorry about your father,” I managed to mutter.  
  
My softened voice and lowered eyes drew a groan from my Nord. “Don’t be like that. I’m trying to look out for you, is all.” A heavy hand landed on my shoulder and shook me back and forth affectionately. “And no need to be sorry. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.”  
  
“Was he…?”  
  
“Captured by Thalmor, never seen or heard from again,” Olev said with disturbing composure and no small amount of fire right under the frozen surface of his face. “I can well enough imagine what happened, even if they never sent his body back for us.”  
  
“You never tried to… I don’t know, find him?”  
  
He laughed outright at my childishly naïve question. “Right after, two of my brothers and I went to Windhelm to pledge ourselves to Ulfric. We thought we could honor our da and maybe even save him, not to mention save Talos himself. That was as stupid as… well, at least as stupid as wanting to become a priest.”  
  
“You’re a Stormcloak?” I said, jaw dropping. How had this not come up yet? And why was he here and not at war?  
  
But, as we approached the first wooden building off of the road, the first building we passed by when we arrived, he gestured for me to go up the steps and into the building first. “Story for another day, Brina. Go find your priest.”  
  
“What about you?” I asked. “I thought you were staying with me.”  
  
Olev shook his head. “I’ll be waiting for you to get done with these priestly duties, but I don’t approve of them.”  
  
“But—“  
  
“Before you go on, way I see it, you don’t owe Mara shit. She didn’t keep your family intact, she didn’t protect you from all the harm your brother would cause you, and she didn’t protect you from any of the horrible things you went through since coming to Skyrim. She gave you a vague warning, and had her priests send you to do her bidding. That’s not worth devoting your life to. I’ll leave you with that to think about while you do her little chores.”  
  
“You’re oversimplifying—“  
  
“And you’re overcomplicating. Live for the moment. Live for yourself. And for your own sake, Brina, do what you need to do to be happy. I’m going to visit some old friends. Catch up. You see your priest, and I’ll be waiting for you as long as it takes.”  
  
Despite myself, I pouted up at him. “What happened to not leaving me alone again?”  
  
In response, he rolled his icy eyes so dramatically they might have just rolled out of his head. “This is a quest for Mara. You won’t be doing anything dangerous, and you’ll have a senior priest to keep an eye on you. Considering that the most you’re likely to do is sit around and pray, I’d say the worst that can happen is you might bite your tongue.”  
  
That was where we parted. He wrapped me in a chaste hug and patted my shoulder, his azure eyes reflecting a kind of concern and care that I always dreamed Brother would have for me when I found him.  
  
The inn itself was full, but not nearly as rowdy as I would expect such a large crowd to be. Miners and merchants, smiths and sailors all sat around the tables and hearth, staring in a daze into nothing. Yawns obscured the music that was played by the inarticulate hands of pretty, sleep-deprived bard. “I envy you travelers. Dreams aren't affecting anyone not from here,” she said through a sigh while her fingertips tangled among themselves on the neck of her lute, making a horrible off-key note that everyone else was too exhausted to react to.  
  
At first, I couldn’t find him through the lazily swaying crowd. But, toward the very back of the room, I recognized those familiar golden robes.  
  
“Everyone, please. I'm doing what I can to end these nightmares. In the meantime, all I ask is you remain strong and put your trust in Lady Mara,” I heard him say in the familiar Dunmer brogue that brought me right back to New Gnisis Cornerclub.  
  
“Excuse me, sir,” I said politely, tapping his shoulder. The face of the man who looked down on me was a kind, gentle one, with fine lines of age drawn across his features to proudly display a lifetime of experience. “My name is Brina. I was sent by the Benevolence of Mara in Riften to assist you in helping the people of Dawnstar.”  
  
“Oh, great,” one patron slurred into his mug, “a second priest to not solve anything.”  
  
“Another priest of Mara?” he asked, sounding less pleased than I expected.  
  
Blushing, I said, “No… not quite. Not yet, at least. I’m uninitiated, but I was sent to help you as a pilgrimage. They said that after I do this, my heart will be open to Mara to become one of her clerics.”  
  
That seemed to make him more satisfied, his grey face nodding in understanding. “Well then, it is a pleasure to meet you, my daughter. My name is Erandur. This is a dangerous task. Are you prepared?”  
  
Prepared? No matter how prepared I was, I always ended up in surprising, dangerous situations, and too often falling from great heights. I just smiled and nodded. How dangerous could it be? Like Olev said, that worst I could do is bite my tongue mid-prayer!  
  
“Mara be praised! Nightcaller Temple is only a short walk from Dawnstar. Come, we must hurry,” he said.  
  
“Nightcaller Temple?” I asked, following on his heels without even knowing where I was being led.  
  
“The source of the problem. It’s just on the hill overlooking the city.”  
  
He briefed me on the situation as he whisked me out of town. Night was falling, and I was a bit concerned about how well I could handle this supposedly dangerous task without any sleep, but there was simply no time to lose.  
  
“These dreams are manifestations created by the Daedric Lord Vaermina. She has an awful hunger for our memories. In return, she leaves behind nightmares, not unlike a cough marks a serious illness. I must end her terrible influence over these people before the damage becomes permanent,” he said somberly as we were pulled inland by the biting wind blowing off the sea.  
  
“Vaermina?” I asked, horrified. I’d have a great big you-were-wrong song prepared for Olev when I returned. “She cursed the city?”  
  
“There’s a bit more to it than that, I’m afraid,” the Dunmer said. “But I shall explain as necessary, when the time arrives.”  
  
“How do you know that it’s a curse, exactly?”   
  
“It is in her mysterious ways, to covet mortal memories. The purpose for her fascination is yet unknown, and I would daresay I would prefer not to know what her perversions may entail. But I can promise you, these symptoms have plagued many in the past, and have permanently damaged the psyches and souls of who have been unfortunate enough to suffer her curse for long,” he explained, making me shiver from more than just the cold.  
  
“Anyway I can help,” I offered with determination that I hoped wasn’t diminished by the shaking in my voice.  
  
“The tower on that hill is our destination,”he said, pointing one long grey finger up the steep, snow-covered slope to a shadowy pillar of stone in the distance. “People around here call it the Tower of the Dawn. I'm not familiar with the tower's history, but it was deserted for quite a long time before Nightcaller Temple was established inside. When the temple was active the priests would rarely be seen in Dawnstar. They preferred to live a solitary existence. The temple's been abandoned for decades now. Ironic isn't it... a ruin within a ruin? ” He chuckled humorlessly at the very irony he pointed out, his face seeming to cloud with words unspoken. I tried to size him up like Brynjolf had taught me, yet the wise Dunmer was all but unreadable. “There's a small shrine to Mara I established inside the tower's entry hall. I was hoping to seek spiritual guidance from Her. It would seem that my prayers were answered, since you’ve arrived at her behest. I am quite blessed for such a fortunate favor. Follow me, it's this way. It feels good to finally have a chance to help these people. Helplessly watching them suffer's been difficult.”  
  
I followed him without further question, trusting in him completely. Something should have seemed out of sorts when, upon being advanced upon by a pair of massive spiders at the door, the gentle priest of compassion fired a deadly spray of flames from his hand. Being an almost-priest who dabbled in destruction, I never thought twice about the oddity, or the other suspicious glances of his red eyes, the nervous purses of his lips and the almost apologetic stare that he kept aiming at the dark tower.  
  
But I’ll get back to all of that.  
  
When we reached the door, he placed a warm hand on my shoulder and met my eyes with deep, passionate optics the color of sunrise. I felt myself melt under his genuine gaze. "You must know what will be awaiting us inside. Years ago, this temple was raided by an orc war party seeking revenge... they were being plagued by nightmares just like the people of Dawnstar,” he warned me. “Knowing they could never defeat the orcs, the priests of Vaermina released what they call the Miasma, putting everyone to sleep. The Miasma was created by the priests of Vaermina for their rituals. It's a gas that places the affected in a deep sleep. Because the rituals would last for months or even years, the Miasma was designed to slow down the aging process.” His eyes grew especially grim, and for good measure, or perhaps to silently beg me not to run away, he put his free hand on my other shoulder as well. “I'm concerned that when this place is unsealed, the Miasma will dissipate and they'll awaken; both orcs and priests alike.”  
  
I gave a slow nod of understanding and looked to the door with a frown. “I hate killing people, but if I have no choice, I understand, and I’m sure Mara will, too.” With some effort, I managed a passable smile Erandur’s way, and he matched my strained expression. “I’m right behind you.”  
  
The door gave way and released a rush of stale air and a blizzard composed of dust and dirt that swirled to greet me. Each step I took inside caused a wave of dust to kick up into the air, save for a little clearing in the wreckage that showed regular traffic. As Erandur had promised, a little shrine to Mara was set up against the wall, as well as a makeshift camp where the man had apparently taken to sleeping. The shrine itself, mostly untouched by the dust, gave testament to either how short of a time he’d been here, or how dedicated he had been in tending to it. Each candle held the oppressive darkness at bay just a little more, so that the whole alter seemed like a bright oasis amidst the sea of darkness and dust, shining dominantly in my peripheral no matter where else my attention was drawn. The face of Mara gazed lovingly out from the center of the alter, looking at me with a sort of expectation that I didn’t remember her depictions ever having before.  
  
Along the back wall, a grotesque relief of a woman loomed over us from behind a narrow wooden alter, as though looking down on an assembled congregation in her honor. Many years ago, that would have been precisely the case; now, she was glowering down at the empty room and two intruders like a true image right from a nightmare. Her body blended into the back wall in places, and her limbs swirled around in a fluid design not at all human in nature, but more like the rising of smoke.  
  
After we prayed before the shrine, Erandur motioned for me to stay beside the statue of Mara while he approached the huge effigy of Vaermina. A gout of flames flew from his hands, bathing the statue in fire. At first, it only served to burn away the dust in flickers and hisses of smoke and sparks of light. Then, once the outer shell of grime was all but dissolved, the fire sunk past the façade of the statue, burning right through an incorporeal outline of what I had thought a very real, physical thing. When the fire died in his hands and the last of it flicked harmlessly through the vague ghost of Vaermina, I found that I could see straight through the wall and into a deeper part of the temple. This was the tower itself, with a wide staircase leading around the wide outer walls of the building.  
  
A smog of sickeningly sweet vapor flooded out from the tower, bathing my feet in a cold shroud like death breathing up beneath me. Each step through the fog felt like wraith-like fingertips running over my boots, pulling gently at my skirts and longingly up my ankles, bidding me to down in its lazy current and lose myself to sleep. Within my first few steps into the tower proper, I must have yawned half a dozen times.  
  
“Keep your wits about you, my daughter,” Erandur said sternly, effectively perking me right back up. “Those who have slept will awaken.”  
  
True to his word, the sleeping denizens of the tower roused at the softest sound of our soft boots on the floor whenever we approached. Orcs and Daedra-worshipping mages alike stumbled up from wherever they had haphazardly fallen decades ago, with the same battle-cry on their lips that had been stopped short at the time of their sleep. Mostly, they were compelled to fight one another, continuing their fight as though it had never stopped. In these cases, Erandur and I often managed to hurry past or otherwise avoid the fight until the survivors inevitably noticed us.  
  
From a stair, Erandur pointed down the inside of the tower to where, at the very bottom, we could see a dais sporting a red glow. “Behold, the source of Dawnstar’s suffering,” he said grimly. “That is the Skull of Corruption, a tool of Vaermina.”  
  
He went on to explain some disconcertingly knowledgeable facts about the staff on the dais, about how it worked and how it was clawing its influence of the tower and into the town, and why it would seek out the dreams if the innocence. Most of it I nodded through, while simultaneously trying to not let all of the details sink in. Somehow, the fact that a dormant tool of a Daedric Prince could wreak such havoc on its own was too dreadful for me to want to acknowledge. If this was the power these things could exercise, what did that say about a Prince themselves? What could Vaermina herself do if she so chose to haunt the people of Dawnstar, rather than just her staff?  
  
I stayed close to Erandur, following him further down until we reached a thick wall of translucent magical energy blocking our way. “Damn it. The priests must have activated this barrier when the Miasma was released.” He touched the barrier, but it was hard and unyielding as stone beneath his balled fist.  
  
“It doesn’t look like something I know how to deactivate,” I said worriedly. “And it looks like this is the only way down.”  
  
“It is,” Erandur confirmed, pacing a tight circle in front of the magical wall. “Hmm, I wonder... There may be a way to bypass the barrier, but I must check their library and confirm it can be done.”  
  
“The library?” I asked. “I didn’t see a library. How do you know there is one? Or that it would have the answers?” I hadn’t intended for the words to come out as an accusation, but with every question I asked, Erandur seemed to grow more and more tense, his eyes seeking anywhere else to look but at me. Only then did I realize that my innocent curiosity was scratching the surface of something much more important. “What am I missing here…?”  
  
The priest shook his head very slowly, his gaunt Dunmeri features seeming all the more tight and strained in the lingering mist of sleep-inducing vapor. “I suppose there's no point in concealing the truth any longer. My knowledge of this temple comes from personal experience. I was a priest of Vaermina. I've spent the last few decades living in regret and seeking redemption from Mara. And by Her Benevolence, I will right my wrongs.”  
  
I would have been more surprised if Olev hadn’t beaten him to the punch of shocking-priestly-affiliations a few hours before. But, rather than Olev, who had turned from his negative memories with bitterness and resentment toward all of the divines, Erandur had followed a lighter path into the Benevolence of Mara.  
  
“Then you’ve done the right thing by turning to Mara,” I said confidently. To Oblivion with Olev’s naysaying about the Gods! If she could lead Erandur from his demons and offer him a better future, then why couldn’t she do the same for me?  
  
His smile was genuine, save for just an ounce of hesitation pronounced in a slow lick across his lips. “I am happy to hear you say that… I only hope that you are not too pious for what may be our only option.”  
  
The ominous rumble of his voice was far from lost on me. Our one option required me to be impious? Well, that didn’t sound like a very good option for a priest and priest-in-training at all.


	18. In Which She Brews a Torpor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So, here we have the conclusion to Brina's adventure in Nightcaller Temple. The learns a lot about the world, and a whole ton about herself, and it will set the stage for her next big experience in Dawnstar

### Chapter Eighteen

“You are unaffiliated with the church itself, correct? You are not yet a priest?” he asked again.  
  
“No,” I said. “Like I said before, this is the mission that’s supposed to change that.”  
  
“Are you affiliated with any other divines, Aedra or Daedra, besides Mara?”  
  
I shook my head. “No. I have always revered the Eight, and I now revere Talos as well as his own entity, but I’m not a priest of anything.”  
  
“And Daedra?” he pressed on.  
  
“No.”  
  
Finally satisfied, he led me back up the way we had come, to another sleepwalker-infested room. We walked in to a raised platform that looked down on all sides at the wrecked library and were immediately attacked.  
  
I should have known, as soon as I walked into a place where I could fall, that I inevitably would. The very first to awaken was a priest of Vaermina, who sent a streak of lightning my way. I was blinded first, electrocuted second, and tossed backward last. The shock itself burnt my whole body and left me feeling singed, hurt, and numb all at once. I had only a moment to think about the sensation before the fact that I was falling came to the forefront of my concerns. I toppled down from the platform above to the library below, with a tall bookcase to thankfully break my fall a little over halfway down. Then, I was deposited the rest of the way to the floor on an uneven pile of unshelved books, and greeted by a none-too-pleased orc raider.  
  
By the time I crawled out of the pile, there was a mercilessly swinging mace right on my tail. Literally, my tailbone was smacked hard while I tried to claw myself out of the mess, making my whole pelvis drop and my legs twitch outward from beneath me. I cried out, and somewhere in the distance, I heard the senior priest of Mara call out in answer, though what he said was entirely lost on me. I wasn’t going to be able to crawl away, not with my tailbone decisively broken by that one hit, but I did manage to turn over and shroud myself in flames. The orc, dropping his mace on me once again, was caught in the flames that leapt from me hungrily, and all at once the fires spread from the tip of his mace, down the handle, over his arms, and all at once, covering his face and torso.  
  
He stumbled back from me, hollering curses and insults, but soon regained his wits and, through the fire that now covered his armor, went down for another strike, this time aimed squarely for my face.  
  
I rolled not away, but towards him, putting myself awkwardly at his feet and risky a painful kick (that he indeed delivered in short order) in exchange for knowing that he would be hard-pressed to find a good angle to swing his mace at me from here. Also, now right below him, I sent a flurry of ice straight upward like a snowstorm in reverse, catching him from an unpredicted side with an attack that turned his fire-weakened extremities uselessly frozen. He tried to readjust his grip on his mace to better swing at me from my new position, but the mace fell from his hands to clatter loudly beside me.  
  
I was readying a bolt of lightning when he fell back himself, too weak to even stand any longer. Mercifully, I doused him with ice and ended him in what I hoped was relatively painless.  
  
“Are you alright?” Erandur asked me, barreling through overturned bookcases for me.  
  
“I’m alright!” I called, but there was no hiding the blood spattered on the torn backside of my robes. Healing light twinkled in my palms as I directed my magicka into a warm, energizing cocoon around me. Immediately, I felt my trade of magicka for physical health pay off.  
  
“Here, let me help.” A second wave of magicka hit me, and the pain in my back let up instantly. Bone breaks can take weeks or months to heal, even with the help of magic at times. But between two healers and the divine blessings of Mara, I was feeling much better after just sitting and casting healing magic for a couple of hours. Safe in a corner of the library, Erandur bid me to rest and doze in and out of consciousness while he alternated between searching in shelves for an answer and coming back to continue the healing process to completion.  
  
I woke from my sporadic nap what I imagined was about three hours later. Erandur, having found what he was looking for, held a massive tome with another disturbing depiction of Vaermina dominating the cover.  
  
“Mara be praised,” he was saying, flipping through the pages. When his red eyes found me stirring, he cast a smile my way. “There is a way past the barrier in the inner sanctum. It involves a liquid known as Vaermina’s torpor.”  
  
“A potion?” I asked uncertainly. “Some kind of dispelling substance that we can pour over the barrier?”  
  
“Not quite,” he said, shaking his head. He held out the book so that the torn and yellowed parchment faced me, sporting archaic swirls of purplish ink drawn into a complicated alchemical diagram. “The Torpor grants an ability the priests of Vaermina called "The Dreamstride"; using dreams to travel distances in the real world,” he continued, drawing his fingers across the picture demonstratively.  
  
“That’s amazing,” I said, leaning in to observe the book.  
  
Erandur nodded slowly, pulling the book back and shutting it with a puff of dust. “Quite amazing, yes. Alchemy and the blessings of a Divine distilled down into an ingestible liquid. Sadly, I have yet to see it function in person.”  
  
I brushed the clinging ashes from my robes and started out of the library with newfound direction. “So, if we find this potion, we can bypass the barrier completely?” I asked, stepping carefully over a fallen priest badly marred by Erandur’s flames.  
  
“Unfortunately,  _we_  isn’t quite right. As a sworn priest of Mara, the elixir won't work for me. The Torpor will only work for Priests of Vaermina, or the unaffiliated. I believe there is a laboratory in the east wing. If we proceed there, we should be able to locate a sample.” He led the way once we stepped out from the library, pointing us deeper into the tower. We came into a large room with two levels, filled with priests and orcs already in the midst of battle. Erandur held one arm out to catch me by the chest, keeping me back until most of the fighting had subsided and only a few survivors remained. Together, we blasted the remainders down, and went in over the fallen to investigate.  
  
Shattered bottles and smashed ingredients littered the floor along with the bodies of priest and invader alike. Erandur began sifting through the shelves on the upper level while I descended down the narrow stairs against the wall, into another area that opened into a wide laboratory. The shelves that lined the walls were covered in thick sheets of dust, and under that dust sat bottles of all colors and sizes, as well as an astounding array of ingredients, all left dormant in the mist of Vaermina’s Miasma. Through the wreckage, I spotted countless treasures that immediately piqued my interest and made my fingers itch toward them—but now was not the time, nor did I really want to take from a shrine of a Daedra.  
  
“Oh, no…” In the far corner, tucked into a little nook and forgotten on a shelf, a large, ornate bottle with a seal depicting Vaermina was sitting on its side. An oil-like substance was leaking from the seal, covering the floor in an iridescent puddle. When I stepped into it to reach for the bottle, the splash it created moved in slow-motion, ripping outward lazily and turning its reflections into shifting, nightmarish shapes that thankfully dissolved into obscurity once again with the continuation of the wave. When the liquid went still, I watched it, waiting many moments for a hand to reach out of the murky liquid and to latch onto my ankle, or something similarly horrible. But the potion went still and silent, and at last I found the courage to lift the bottle and hold it upright. Gently shaking the bottle revealed that the remainder of the concoction was almost nil.  
  
How desperate was the situation? Should I just lean down and try to slurp it off the floor? Normally I would never do anything like that, especially such a toxic-looking stuff from dirt, grime, and blood covered ground. But outside, in Dawnstar, people were suffering. Surely the situation called for drastic measures…!  
  
Erandur, once I showed him the bottle, sighed and shook his head with defeat. “This is tragic. Without the torpor, there is no way to get through the barrier. The Dreamstride would have been the only way.”  
  
Very gently, I nudged the great Vaerminian tome from under his arm. “Well, it’s just a potion, right? And this place is filled with potent, exotic ingredients. If we can find that page you showed me before, with the alchemical diagram, I may be able to work out how to brew a new one!”  
  
Even in the dim lighting, I could see Erandur’s face twist painfully at the suggestion. “Because of all of the odd principles involved, there is quite a lot of debate as to whether this is really a dream or just the machinations of Vaermina. There is no saying if the torpor would work if not made by a priest.”  
  
“I can find a way to alchemically ground it to Vaermina,” I said, gaining confidence as I flipped through the book to find that page. Yes, that glorious page, filled with a complicated alchemical circle and ornate, archaic lettering instead of plain ingredients and instructions. “I may not be a priest, but there are ingredients here that are drawn naturally toward Oblivion. And I’m sure the ingredients are in here—yes, look! I’m almost definitely sure that that funny little symbol is a Daedra heart!”  
  
“Are you sure?”  
  
“I am. I know I am,” I said. If I was anything at all, it was a damn good alchemist. From the growing ingredient list, it would be very dangerous and no doubt poisonous. Was I good enough to purify the stuff into a safe potion? Yes, I thought, I just had to be. An entire city depended on me to be that good. “I’ll start gathering the ingredients. Do me a favor and get the calcinator heated while I gather ingredients!”  
  
The grocery list was long. Most potions only really needed a handful of ingredients, especially when the alchemist knows exactly what result they’re going after and what components can be used to garner them. But the diagram pointed me in every direction, from mundane plants, to Daedra hearts, void salts, and even (Mara have mercy) human flesh. It went on and on, and I continued to stack up items beside Erandur, who patiently prepared the tools to my specifications.  
  
On the bottom of the page, at the root of the diagram, a swirl of vapor, like a smoke, or a swirling liquid, indicated something hallucinogenic. Luckily, the whole place was filled with that, too. Fly amanita, moonsugar, skooma, and some potent alcohol for good measure. My arms were full of them when I teetered back up the stairs to Erandur’s low groan.  
  
“Are you sure this is what the recipe calls for? This looks more like a potion to connect one with Sanguine or Sheogorath than Vaermina…”  
  
“It’s the best idea I have,” I said with a sniff, already sorting my ingredients and setting the void salts in the calcinator.  
  
“I just hate to see you kill yourself trying to replicate a potion that would have been a devoted priest’s life’s work.”  
  
I was slicing the human flesh into narrow strips, praying to the Divines for forgiveness and doing my best to keep from vomiting when I squeaked out breathlessly, “I need to try.”  
  
He quieted down after that. While I continued to work, he went into a melancholy and sat nearby, praying under his breath and apologizing to me for any harm that may befall me. But I was confident that it would work, if not because I had faith in my abilities or was, deep down, reveling in the chance to prove my alchemical skill, but because I knew that if my faith wavered for just a moment, it would be the people of Dawnstar who would suffer for it.  
  
Hours passed over the alchemical table. I followed the book as well as I could, thinking prayers to Mara and uttering chants to Vaermina as the recipe appeared to indicate. Before long, I was left with an oily sludge that would have choked and killed me if I dared to drink it. Now came the hardest part.  
  
I had to purify the mixture.  
  
To a non-alchemist, it may sound simple. You just take the bad away and leave the good. But in actual practice, to reach beyond the physical properties and rid a potion of magical properties requires incredible skill and talent. Even the best may never achieve that kind of ability. Arcadia could do it, and she showed me the method many times. Ingun Black-Briar thought she could do it, and that was why she bought all of the potions I made in Riften, though her master was adamant that she was not yet ready for such a challenge.  
  
Now it was my turn to try. And my life depended on making it work. I ran it through several cycles in the alembic, over and over, never satisfied that the negative effects were ever entirely cleansed until I nearly cracked the crystal vessel from overuse. Then, alternating it between the retort and alembic to give each apparatus the rest they needed, I spent well over and hour trying desperately to lighten the sludge into something safe and drinkable.  
  
Finally, I lifted a small vial with my product. The purification process had left very little to be consumed, but I was sure that it would be a very potent mixture.  
  
“Are you sure that this can function like Vaermina’s Torpor?” Erandur asked gravely, turning the vial over in his hand and holding it to the dim torches to observe its oily glean.  
  
“It’s as close to the Torpor as anyone can make short of the priests who made the genuine thing,” I said. The liquid had an oily texture and composition like what I had seen on the floor of the laboratory. I didn’t mention to Erandur how mine was a bright, scarlet red instead of an inky black, or that mine gave off a shimmering reflection.  
  
All in all, it was still dangerous, if only in the fact that I didn’t know what it would do. I knew it wasn’t poisonous; my purification had been thorough and, I thought, successful. I was in no danger of the concoction, then, just of what the intended effects were that I was unprepared for.  
  
At least I knew I wouldn’t just keel over dead.  
  
“If this works like a true Torpor,” Erandur said, “it would typically involve viewing the memory of another through your own eyes and with your own body. Those around you will perceive you as normal and you will find the words you utter may not be your own.”  
  
“But we can’t be sure if this will work exactly like the real thing,” I said. Even following the instructions as closely as I could, they were written to be coded for only the best and most loyal priests to follow.  
  
“I swear upon Lady Mara that I will do everything within my power to prevent any harm from befalling you.” The sentiment was appreciated, though we both knew that, not knowing what awaited me, there was little or nothing he could do if anything went wrong. How would we even know if something wasn’t going as it should?   
  
No sense in lamenting it, though. I did everything I could, and there was only one way to find out if it would work at all.  
  
“Now or never, I guess,” I whispered, taking the potion back from a hesitant Erandur to lift the vial to my lips.  
  
Time stopped. I was the only thing moving. And the only direction I was going was straight to the floor. I fell in a heap at Erandur’s feet, and the world began to move again. Very, very fast.  
  
I was falling. Though the floor, through the tower, through Nirn, right through until I was outside of everything that ever was. Was this Oblivion? The Void? Aetherius?  
  
Or was it just the fact that I made the most potent drug this side of Elsweyr? Many moments passed in limbo, with only mild awareness that I was turning and spinning in the air until, all at once, I came to a full stop just inches above the ground. Lowering myself down with an elegance I thought was reserved for royalty, I surprised myself with how quickly I regained my composure.  
  
If these were supposed to be the memories of someone from Vaermina’s fold, and I was meant to be in Nightcaller Temple, I clearly mixed something up. Badly. This place held no resemblance to the stone tower, or the Pale, or Skyrim even. Instead, sprawling to the very horizon was a massive garden, going in all directions with flowers that reached up to the sky—which, by the way, was nothing like the sky I knew. Overhead what should have been blue was dominated by a waving metallic sheet of the most vibrant violet, like a positively enormous silken sheet fluttering in the wind to cover the entire world. Between threads that moved of their own accord, something vaguely like sunlight shone through. My first steps hissed like steam, the sound of my shoes violently coming to terms with the very new soil beneath them. When at last they understood that this was ground, their tempers quieted.  
  
Calling for Erandur seemed like the immediate course of action. My first few shouts achieved nothing but a mildly annoyed rustle of leaves around me. Then, as I filled my lungs with honey-scented air for my fourth cry, my breath was stolen. A hand wound itself around my waist, comfortably resting at the curve of my hip.  
  
“No need to scream, sweetheart,” a teasing voice whispered into my ear, sending a wave of intoxication through me (as if I weren’t messed up enough already). “I hear ya, I hear ya. That Erandur doesn’t hear you, though. But not to worry! I’ve got you just fine. Can you walk?”  
  
That was a stupid question, I thought—right until I tried to take a step, and fell immediately into the grasp of my mysterious companion. “I guess not…”  
  
“Oh, I got ya! Here, between the two of us,” he slurred, hiccupping halfway through, “we’re sure to get somewhere.”  
  
“I need to be at Nightcaller Temple!” I said. “I’m supposed to be passing the barrier. Is this the Dreamstride? Are these memories?”  
  
My friend laughed, and for the first time it occurred to me to see who it was. The voice rang a bell, but…  
  
“Oh, by the Eight and Talos!” I screamed, recoiling. “What are you?!”  
  
He laughed again, harder this time, letting his fangs like white-painted teeth on a wood saw all show. With red and black designs across his face, what I might have assumed to be war paint, he could have passed for some kind of feral berserker. “You don’t remember me? Don’t be embarrassed; I’m not upset! I can hardly hold it against you when I tend to make memories disappear. Worse that Vaermina sometimes, but always better.”  
  
“What are you?” I asked again, taking control over my breathing once more. “And where am I, if not in Vaermina’s realm?”  
  
The Daedra cleared his throat and made a point of pretending to sobering up to better explain. “I am your master. You may remember me as Sam Guevenne, but on a few very fun nights, you’ve known me as Uncle Sanguine.”  
  
“Uncle—Wait, hold on, no way! If you’re Sanguine, why would you keep showing up where I am? Why would you even care? You can do anything!”  
  
“I can,” he agreed. “But you are great at parties. How many times do you remember meeting me? Just out of curiosity!”  
  
I didn’t need to think too hard. “In Whiterun, the night of the big party. Then in Riften.”  
  
“How many times in Riften?”  
  
The question made me blanch. “There was more than once?!”  
  
His responding grin made me feel dirty all over. “Not as many times as Windhelm. Oh, but the sujamma you would drink would make you see stars five or six rounds in!”  
  
“Why?” I asked, appalled. “Why would you follow me around?”  
  
“I keep telling you, you’re great for parties! You’re fun! Really, I haven’t had a better high priestess in years.” He burst out laughing. “ _High_ priestess! Get it? Because you are high as a cliffracer right now!”  
  
“Are you sure you’re Sanguine? Not Sheogorath? Or maybe at least some kind of facet of Vaermina?” I asked, not quite sure what answer I should even hope for. “Please, just tell me where I am so I can get back to Nighcaller Temple!”  
  
If anything, a twinge of disappointment went over the Daedra’s features, but he remained by my side. The hand on my hip gave a little squeeze. “You want to know where you are? You’re on the floor!” Just like that, the smile that usually graced my dear Sam’s face was back, just much more fang-y and on a much more demonic face. “Don’t get too riled up. I know, you wanted to make Vaermina’s potion, and you got damn close! But to make it, you need the blessings of the Prince itself, and that you do not have. Instead, you’ve got my own blessing, and enough moonsugar, skooma, mushrooms, and wine in you to put some of my best orgies to absolute shame! Not to mention plenty of Oblivion-derived bits and pieces to send you right my way!”  
  
“So where am I, then? If I was sent to you, how am I supposed to get through the barrier in Nightcaller Temple?” I was getting more and more frustrated, and his intoxicating touch wasn’t calming me like it used to. “I can still get through the barrier somehow, can’t I?”  
  
“I don’t make a habit of interfering with other Princes, especially Vaermina since we’re usually on such good terms, but since you’re here, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to get you to the other side. And, if you couldn’t tell, your mind is in Oblivion. One of my pockets in the infinite expanse.”  
  
“You can do that?”  
  
Sanguine’s grin went sinister. “As you pointed out a minute ago, I can do anything. Your world is a playground to me, in which the rules just don’t apply.” The further he led me into the garden, the stranger the plants became. Through hedges, I heard whispering and quiet laughter, and as we went deeper, those innocent sounds turned darker, moans that turned to primal cries. “I can help you back in the temple. Or you can stay. You’re always welcome.” His offer was punctuated by a feminine scream of release in the distance and a squeeze of his hand on my hip that sent a wave of electricity through my flesh.  
  
It took a conscious clearing of my mind and all the focus I could muster to fight the urge to say yes. But, biting back the desires that were swimming through me, I said, “I need to complete the task for Lady Mara. I need to help the people of Dawnstar.” The words were coming out of me like a mantra for control. Sanguine was getting into my head and I knew it. “I need to help destroy the Skull of Corruption.”  
  
The Prince’s laughter broke me out of my self-induced trance. “You are just too much, sweetheart! You’ve got me helping you against one of my allies for the sake of my enemy. You do realize that, don’t you? Oh, but this is why I like you. All kinds of fun, getting me to do things even  _I_  normally wouldn’t! I’ll get you around that wall of yours, but you must do something for me.”  
  
Too many stories started with Daedra offering something for a price. Those tales usually ended with someone’s head off their shoulders. But, seeing as I was already in his realm and using the Torpor was out of the question, I dared to ask, “What?”  
  
“When you get back to Dawnstar, you are going to insist that that priest of Mara have a drink with you. Tell him to forget about the rule to live soberly. You need to celebrate, and just a bit of wine won’t hurt!”  
  
It was sound enough for me, since I already knew I didn’t care for Mara’s take on booze myself. “Alright, fine. I’ll treat the priest to some wine. Is that all? You don’t have a problem with me becoming a priest myself?”  
  
His answering laugh was surprisingly good-natured. “No, no! Believe me, I can’t wait to defile the priest of one of my more hated enemies! We’ll have a ball! Just watch the way you Walk, and we’ll keep getting along just fine, you and I.”  
  
“Walk?” The question was gone before it left my mouth, lost in an empty black nothingness while my consciousness plummeted back into Mundus. I felt as though I was spinning, like I had way too much to drink. I felt ground beneath me, cold stone floor, and as my sight began to slowly restore itself, I saw that I was right beside a wall. I propped myself against it and began to stand by pawing my way up the flagstones until one hand, trying to find a hold despite my blurred, double, and spinning vision, slipped against some metal fixture on the wall.  
  
I regained my full awareness to see a soul gem tumble to the floor and, somewhere to my right, a bright sheet of light fade.  
  
“It… it worked!” I heard Erandur exclaim. “Mara be praised! It’s nothing like I imagined the torpor to work, though. Are you alright? You just fell and then…”  
  
“No, it didn’t work,” I confessed through my mounting embarrassment. I had a lot to think about. If that insane dream had been more than just a hallucination, and I really was somehow in league with Sanguine, then maybe I couldn’t become a priest after all, no matter if Sanguine wanted me to or not. Matters were suddenly far more complicated. What did it even mean to be blessed by a Daedra? The very concept seemed like an oxymoron, and for the life of me I could not recall a story about a Daedric Prince that worked out well in the end. “But something else happened, and it got us through the barrier. We can worry about everything else later, but we need to destroy that staff before matters can get any more… strange.”  
  
Erandur took a good long moment to look me over, taking me in with a scrutiny that I wouldn’t have expected from him before. I swore, it was like he was looking for something, some specific indicator of what had happened and what to make of it. Then, with an agonizingly slow nod, he said, “Then I suppose we should continue on.”  
  
We kept on with our descent, through what appeared to be the living quarters with only a bit of resistance from the waking priests and orcs. So close, I could feel the air grow heavy toward the bottom of the tower, as though the Skull of Corruption was weighing down the whole world around it, sending everything spiraling downward with its infernal spell. So, their air itself was distorted not with the lingering miasma, but a faint reddish glow as I had seen cast from the Skull when we looked down on it from above.  
  
Everywhere the reddish glow touched, by skin felt wrong, alternating hot and cold or itching just enough to tell me something was very wrong.  
  
Only a stone corridor stood between us and it, with the bloody glow reaching for us with increasing intensity; there, in that haunting light two priests of Vaermina stood like sentries, arms crossed and eyes locked on Erandur and I like long-hated enemies.  
  
To my surprise, Erandur came to a halt. I turned, searching for an explanation, but his face was locked in an expression of guilt and pain. In his eyes, memories of a different lifetime shone in a sheen of rising tears, and I watched as he aged right before my eyes under the weight of remembered pain. “Wait… Veren…! Thorek…! You’re  _alive_!” he sputtered in equal parts shock, relief, and agony.  
  
“No thanks to you, Casimir,” the first of the two men, a Dunmer with a sharp-looking goatee and hair shaved clean on both sides of his head.  
  
“I… no longer use that name,” Erandur told them, straightening as he remembered his purpose. “I’m Erandur, priest of Mara.”  
  
The Nord priest spat at Erandur’s feet. “Priest of Mara? That is what became of wretched, cowardly Casimir?”  
  
“You are a traitor! You left us to die and ran before the Miasma took you!” Veren accused.  
  
“No… I was scared!” Erandur said defensively. I could see the fear, that fear that he’d been carrying for so many years. “I wasn’t ready to sleep!”  
  
“Enough of your lies! I won’t allow you to destroy the Skull, priest of Mara!” Veren said.  
  
They were drawing weapons that shone like frozen blood under the ghastly glow of the Skull behind them, and before I could well enough get my wits about me to prepare a spell, Erandur was shouting, “Then you leave me no choice!” and firing a bolt of fire straight past my head and into Veren with such force that he flew back many feet and disappeared into the haze emanating from the Daedric staff.  
  
Now, I’m not much of a warrior, but I know very well how to hit someone who’s immobile and on the ground. I took advantage of that, and loosed needles of ice from every one of my fingertips, licking my lips with grim satisfaction when I heard the  _squish_  of impact between them and soft flesh. It wouldn’t hold him down for long, so I prepared a bolt of lightning in my palms—  
  
And very promptly forgot about it when my attention was forced on a gleaming blade coming through the center of my vision. I ducked in time to keep the top of my head in place, by very quickly had to skitter backwards in order to keep Thorek from skewering me. The Nord was staggered, just for a moment, by another one of Erandur’s flames, but he shrugged off the magical effect with all the nonchalance that one would expect from a hardened Daedric zealot. Once again, his sword went for a horizontal slash and, as I tried to back even further, I bumped into the stone wall behind me and felt my skin rip open across my ribcage, jolts of thunder riding down the length of Thorek’s blade to spark their way through my open flesh.  
  
And shit, did that hurt!  
  
There was no going back, though, so instead I went forward, inside of Thorek’s reach, which he hadn’t been expecting. As he adjusted his grip and lurched backward to aim a downward stab into my shoulder, I was reaching up through his open defenses, and clasping my hand tight over his face.  
  
He didn’t shrug this fire off nearly as well.  
  
Between the heat of my fire and the blast that it caused when I launched it from my hand and directly into something else, when Thorek fell back heavily into the stone, I couldn’t make our where there had been a face at all. I wanted to vomit, of course, but with the tear in my skin, I got an awful image of my guts spewing from the cut, which both deterred me from throwing up, and made me feel the need to lose my lunch all the more.  
  
No time to focus on that, though. Veren was rising from the red mist, lightning in his own hand as well as a hungry mace. Between me and him, there was Erandur, who stood with fire licking up from his hands and up to the ceiling, leaving singe marks on the stone.  
  
Fire met thunder an instant later, blinding me in a flash of elements. When the world returned to me, I saw Veren fall to the floor, smoke rising from his body and his robes flickering with embers. In front of me, Erandur was on his hands and knees, gasping for breath.  
  
“Hold still!” I cried out, tripping over Thorek’s body in my urgency to get to his side and begin healing him.  
  
“I knew Thorek and Veren. They were my friends,” the Dunmer whispered painfully. “Is this punishment for my past? I sit Mara’s will to torment me so?”  
  
“Of course not!” I said. He wasn’t injured badly at all, but his robes were singed. In just a few moments, I was helping him to his feet. “Don’t you get it? The Gods and Princes may set the stage for all of this, but ultimately  _we_  are the ones burdened with the decisions and the consequences. The strings they pull will affect us, but we choose how much. In the end, this world is ours, not theirs.”  
  
Erandur regarded me with a long, stern look, but finally gave a little nod (whether in agreement or just to humor me, I wasn’t sure) and looked to the Skull. I followed his red eyes up to the nightmare-inspiring staff, which loomed over us with an air of amusement. “It’s time. The Skull must be destroyed. If you’ll stand back, I’ll perform the ritual granted to me by lady Mara.” Dutifully, I stayed far away while the priest took his place directly in front of the staff on its raised dais, holding his arms out in front of him like a live conduit for Mara’s powers. “I call upon you, Lady Mara! The Skull hungers. It yearns for memories and leaves nightmares in its wake. Grant me the power to break through this barrier and to send the Skull to the depths of Oblivion!”  
  
I waited anxiously for the staff to crumble instantly, but to my dismay, a voice spoke, smooth and terrible, directly in my mind.  
  
“We meet again, mortal, for we have met before, whether you know it or not. When you mutter in your sleep, you speak to me. When you waken wet with sweat, you've just left my house. I dwell in your dreams; I savor your nightmares. Now, you will serve me. Kill Casimir, who would betray you before you leave this tower, and receive my blessing, Priestess of Mara!”  
  
I’d had enough of this bullshit.  
  
I wish I knew what came over me, if it was just more of the tirade I’d begun before with Erandur or my own mind finally being made up, but I was growling back at the disembodied voice with natural conviction, “I am no priest of Mara! I walk in her blessing, and the blessing of Sanguine, and with the strength of everyone I’ve ever known and loved, but I am priest of nothing, and I don’t need or want any more blessings from anyone! If you think for a moment that a Daedra or Aedra of any sort will have me, you’re dead wrong! We are pawns to all, Aedra and Daedra, and I’m sick of being baited with blessings and answers! I am priest of myself, because my own blessing is the only one that’s ever going to save me or give me what I want! You can go back and tell your friend Sanguine that, and Mara too if you cross her! To Oblivion with all of you, where you belong, because I have had enough being pushed and prodded and pulled along with your games!”  
  
Divine light had been cascading from Erandur and into the Skull, breaking away its barrier and chipping at its existence. With the last of my indignant screams, that light sparked, and the Skull shattered into a million pieces that fell away into nothing, and by the time they landed on the floor, they were just shadows against the stones that faded with the lifting red fog.  
  
Erandur turned, very slowly, and again I saw that hard stare from before.  
  
“When I asked before if you were unaffiliated with Mara or any other Divines or Daedra…?”  
  
“I meant it. And now it’s as true as I intended it to be,” I answered decisively. “I’m glad that Dawnstar is safe. But for now, I’m going to have to decline becoming a priest. Just, uh…” I dug in my satchel and dug out a small bottle I’d been saving to share with Olev later. “I promised Sanguine I’d give you alcohol. You don’t have to drink it, but just because I’m not planning on being his priestess doesn’t mean I want to get on his bad side. Promise is a promise, for getting me past the barrier.”  
  
“Sanguine?” Erandur repeated, one brow rising considerably.  
  
“Yes. Sanguine. I didn’t know I was a favorite of his until that failed Torpor landed me in his realm, and he told me all about it.”  
  
My Dunmer companion nodded slowly, and set one hand on my shoulder. It felt very much like my own father was looking down at me with serious but empathetic eyes. “If you trust in Lady Mara, she would lead you from the wickedness of the Daedra, just like she did for me.”  
  
“You know, some things Sanguine said made me think that’s exactly what he would want. And I don’t want to be the tool for him to corrupt the whole clergy and its followers. Besides, all due respect to Lady Mara, but she won’t save me from the things I would expect her to save me from. I would want too much if I gave my life to her. I would expect so much, so much that I can only get from myself. Please, don’t think I don’t revere and respect Lady Mara but…” I looked to my feet, ashamed. “I cannot be her priest. Not now.”  
  
Again Erandur was sympathetic and understanding. In silence, we walked back to the top of the tower, and prayed before the shrine he’d erected. In front of Ama Nin’s stoic face, I felt her compassion and love, and a pang of disappointment. After my wounds were healed, I left the amulet that the priests of Riften had given me on the altar, and gave Erandur a warm embrace of farewell.  
  
“If you ever need anything, I will remain here with the people of Dawnstar,” he told me.  
  
“Thank you,” I said, opening the door to the very first rays of sunlight coming over the horizon, casting a weak shadow of the tower over me.  
  
Beyond the tower, the city of Dawnstar was waking to find that its nightmares were gone. My own nightmares were killed, not by the grace of Mara or the blessing of Vaermina, but by my own decision. I would not be haunted by my past. It was not Mara who had ended my nightmares throughout my journey, but my own peace of mind and the love of those around me. And just as I could not look to the Gods for peace and happiness and fulfillment, I could not look to Brother, either. I would find him, not because I needed him, but because I deserved an answer from him, and because it was about damn time he answered for everything he’d done, and everything I’d been through for his sake and because of him.  
  
I was not a Daedric priest, or an Aedric priest, and by the Eight and Talos I would  _not_  be a priest to my brother.  
  
I followed the top edge of the sun back to the main road, and I was rehearsing all of the you-were-rights I had for Olev when I realized that, the further north I walked through the city, the snowy road ahead was marred by footprints and smatterings of blood. Once, there had been a time when I would have avoided such signs of danger and ill-omen. Those days were gone, and I was running in the direction of a man’s scream of agony without a second thought to the north until I was out of the town with the sea in front of me… and something positively horrifying at my back.


	19. In Which She Goes Through a Black Door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In his chapter, Brina discovers that she has a phobia of werewolves. Then things get really weird.

### Chapter Nineteen

It was sobering, and strangely, for as long as I’d traveled alone since burying my parents and beginning my search for my only remaining family, I felt like I’d finally grown up.   
  
My descent from Nightcaller Temple felt as though it was accompanied by a descent back to the real world. That world, that temple, and everything I’d seen gave me a new perspective on Nirn and Mundus, and where I belonged in that new, wider picture. My life had never been idyllic or sheltered, but I felt as though my eyes were opened, and as cynical as I’d once been, I looked back on myself with shock at my own naiveté. Once, I had believed that my brother was a hero, no matter what atrocities he could commit, and that the gods were watchful parents to all of Mundus, and that the Daedra stood on the outside, concerning themselves only with the most important of people and greatest calamities. But now I realized that the balance was far different than I’d ever imagined. Neither the Aedra or my brother would bring me safety and peace and happiness no more now than they ever had through my countless pains and trials, and I was finally coming to terms with the fact that all of those things would need to be achieved by me and no one else.  
  
Dawn over Dawnstar, the perfect sight to greet me after escaping the clutches of two greedy Daedra, was still in the frozen morning air. No snow fell, but a fresh blanket of frost covered everything from the night before, and my every breath was a puff of crystalline steam that coated my eyelashes in white. The sky, amazingly clear, was mostly black and just barely brightening with the first rays of sunlight peeking over the horizon. To the north, thick clouds hid the stars and promised more blizzard to come, but for now, it was peaceful and silent in the still-sleeping city. Those who were waking, I imagined, would be coming to with the elating discovery that their dreams had not been haunted as much as they remember. Starting tomorrow night, they will see that the cursed has been lifted completely.  
  
You see, despite my suddenly-cynical outlook, my heart felt lighter and the future brighter than ever. My realization that I could only rely on myself was accompanied by no bitterness, at least not toward men or mer. For I knew that they all were in the same boat as me, all striving for an ideal of happiness in a universe that cared nothing for whether or not they actually achieved it. Not since dancing under the Gildergreen did I feel such a universal connection and camaraderie with the rest of the world, and it lifted my spirits.  
  
Olev could have been anywhere, and I sorely doubted he would be in the inn. Wandering through the streets until the sun rose and he would awaken from wherever he’d been staying seemed as good an idea as any, so I crunched my way through the snow, heading further north to the edge of the city while the rising sun warmed the air around me.  
  
It had seemed prudent to change out of my bloodstained priest robes, so I now wore the beautiful grey and red outfit that Ama Nin left for me in the Riften Benevolence beneath Missus Loreius’s torn and tattered remnants of a cloak. If nothing else, I could use the rags left of her cloak to patch up my priest robes, so at least one of the two could be properly wearable again. Perhaps later, when I told Olev about everything, I could get some needles and thread to busy my hands.  
  
The tangent of my thoughts faded away into empty shock when I looked down to the ground and spotted red in the snow. At first, I was convinced that I was looking at some fallen snowberries, littered across the ground perhaps by some children who’d been collecting them and gotten distracted or bored. But the further I walked, the more frozen pearls of red I found, and the more they conglomerated into larger, more ominous puddles of icy red glass.  
  
A conscious decision was never made; instead, my feet started into a sprint of their own accord while my mind struggled to come to a conclusion.  _Since when do I rush headlong into blatant danger?_  I wondered. I had done so for Olev, when I heard his voice crying out in the bandit camp that night. I had run into the red glow of dragon’s fire outside of Whiterun, and I had accepted a pilgrimage from Mara to cleanse a city of a Daedric curse. But the girl I thought I was, the scared, weak little farm girl from Kvatch would ever have done any of those things! And she wouldn’t be following a trail of blood out of the city!  
  
Who was this girl, and how long had I been her without realizing I’d changed?  
  
My feet weren’t having any such existential dilemma. No, they just ran, following the blood without any burden of identity, conscience, or self-preservation.  
  
“Hello?!” I called out into the frigid, empty shoreline before me. The city was behind me, and beyond I could see only thin islands running parallel to the shore and icebergs drifting off into the vast sea. As far as I could tell, there was no one. “Is there someone out here?! Are you alright?!”  
  
The prospect of a person being in real mortal danger effectively took my mind off of my own personal quandaries. I could deal with that later, on my own time, but right here and now, a person might well be dying!  
  
There was no one, anywhere! I looked up and down the shore, but saw nothing. I must have missed where the blood led to!  
  
I was about to turn around, and was surprised when I heard not a voice, but a low, threatening snarl. My terror was only matched by my stupidity, however, so naturally I wheeled around curiously with wide eyes to see a massive beast.  
  
I will describe it as I remember it, though Olev would later tell me that I was daft and had to be making it all up, and he can say whatever he wants because if he’d been there he’d have soiled his damn trousers and we both know it.  
  
It was monstrous, twice my height, with eyes blood red and bloody foam pouring from its mouth like canis root tea boiling over a stewpot. A huge mouth, large enough to fit a grown man’s head between its jaws, snapped at me while claws long as daggers swept through the air for me.  
  
I slid backward on the slick ground, dodging it as a ragged scream escaped my lips. This… this  _thing_  was more terrifying to me than the dragon I’d helped fight, the Butcher in Windhelm, or Mercer Frey, or Vaermina’s priests, and was decidedly the most horrible creature I’d ever faced. It was all I could do just to get away, but every spell I’d ever known was out of my head as my feet tangled beneath me in a desperate struggle to escape the blood-filled maw of whatever-it-was. Before long, I was splashing into the frozen waters, shrieking and knowing that the town was too far for anyone to even hear me. I would die, just because I felt some kind of need to help a stranger. Damn it, back when I was a coward, I never got into trouble like this!  
  
Water splashed up as I clamored through it, drenching me, but I kept right going, not sure of how deep I was willing to go. Of course, with every panicked step, I lost a little more feeling in my toes, then up to my ankles, and the numbness spread.  
  
Knee-deep in icy waters, I whirled around at the horrible  _howling_  I heard behind me. The great monster was swinging itself wildly, guttural howling shaking the whole world around it. On its back, riding it like the true lunatic he was, I saw the slender form of a man holding tight through the beast’s relentless flailing. How was he holding on at all? The question was immediately answered when I saw that he was firmly anchored by some kind of dagger plunged deep into the thing’s side. The more the monster fought, the more he tore the wound wider, until at last the man was thrown off, leaving a massive gash in the monster’s ribs. As the madman tumbled away, I saw that he was stained with red, and the trail I’d followed had no doubt been left by him. An eye for an eye, it looked like. The beast howled angrily, and, while I was still positively terrified of it despite its wounded state, I was plodding back to the shore quick as I could, finally able to recall a damn spell.  
  
Blue light emanated from my hand, which I held to the monster’s face half because I knew it was how the spell was supposed to be enacted and I just didn’t have my wits about me to think to do anything else. If nothing else, my time spent in the Thieves Guild had given me much practice in the illusion school of magic, and without that experience, my attempt to pacify the nightmarish ghoul would have been a dismal failure.  
  
Instead of biting my head right off of my shoulders, it stood back, dazed, its eyes glazing as his mind went blank.  
  
Run away, my brain screamed at me! Get away! My frozen feet stumbled over themselves, too numb to support my weight any longer, and my mind whirred with confusion as my sudden magicka deprivation brought a lightheadedness into the equation as well. Luckily, a strong hand clamped hard on my wrist, tugging me not toward the city (which we certainly wouldn’t have made it to before the spell wore off from our new friend), but right for the jagged stone cliffs behind us.  
  
I thought he was mad. In fact, I  _knew_  he was, because this wasn’t the first time I’d had the pleasure of meeting the maniac. But why were we heading right for the dark outcropping? He’d find us there for sure! There was nowhere to hide in that direction!  
  
The soft glow of coming dawn could not reach into the shadows that shrouded this place. Nestled into the stones, behind a thicket of tangled nightshade, a massive tablet was set against the cliff face. Across its dirty surface, packed with dirt and mud and obscured by the general darkness, I could barely make out the image of a person and what might have been, but certainly couldn’t have been, a massive skull. I didn’t realize it was a door until, with a hurried whisper from my companion, the thing swung inward with a loud, wailing creak of protest from the hinges. Before I could demand an explanation, I was shoved into the hole in the cliff face, into the absolute darkness that awaited us. Still lacking feeling in my feet, I tumbled the first few steps.  
  
“Not to worry. Not to… ugh…  _huff_ … worry! Safe in here. This is Sanctuary, after all,” Cicero whispered. He descended the stairs quickly, not because he wasn’t in pain, but it seemed because he was too weak to fight against gravity. When he made it to me, he smiled a wide, crazed grin. “You found me just in time. It’s like you knew. Did someone tell you? Did you—ooh-hoo-hoo—did you  _hear_  from someone? Were you _Listening_ , perhaps?”  
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I followed a trail of blood here. And if we don’t get some fire soon, my toes are going to freeze off. And if I’m distracted by my toes falling off, it’s going to be a lot harder to heal… well, to heal whatever in Mara’s name happened to you.” I explained as calmly as I could manage. And, to be honest, it wasn’t calm at all. The volume and pitch fluctuated wildly with every syllable, and what wasn’t shrieked or fearfully whispered was probably unintelligible through the chattering of my teeth.  
  
“Hush, hush… It’ll all be alright, little sister.” I figured the nickname was because of the short time we’d spent together outside of Whiterun, when I’d told him that I was in Skyrim looking for the last remaining member of my family. It told me that he really did remember, though, despite our first and only meeting being so short, so I took that as a good sign. “Cicero is still strong enough… to get us… to safety…” His breathing got more ragged as he began to lift me up.  
  
When I rose, I saw that the other side of the door boasted the same relief as the outside, but with far less mud caked on, and impeccable detail for all to see. It was indeed a massive skull dominating the scene, and the figure beneath it was a skeletal form looking over a pile of yet more skulls, a dagger poised above the remains of the dead. Stamped on the main skull’s forehead was a handprint, red as blood and looking as slick and wet and fresh as if the final touch had been laid just minutes before we arrived.  
  
“Cicero… where are we?”  
  
“Sanctuary.”  
  
My heart stopped. “What  _kind_  of sanctuary?”  
  
The smile that spread on my little jester’s face could have made Mercer Frey shiver.  
  
“Cicero, tell me,” I insisted, my voice as high and hysterical as I’d ever heard it from my own lips. Suddenly, the monster outside, the single most frightening sight I’d ever laid eyes upon, was no longer the least of my worries. “I need you to tell me what this place is.”  
  
His face flashed a million different emotions, each lingering no more than the slightest iota of a second before disappearing back into the darkness behind his impossibly intense ochre eyes. He was telling me all the answers, everything, maybe even the story of his whole life, as open a book as the plainest text, but all the answers were gone so fast that I couldn’t pin down a single hint before it was dissolved and replaced with another. It had to have been only a few moments, but they were long and terrifying, filling me with more dread for every answer Cicero deemed me unworthy of telling. At long last, his face finally deciding on a proud smirk, he whispered in a voice that rang on every stone like a chorus, “This is one of the last remaining sanctuaries of the Dark Brotherhood.”  
  
My feet weren’t the only part of me that felt numb. I couldn’t feel anything, like my whole body had been plunged into the ice water outside. “And… how were you able to get in?”  
  
The widening of his smirk into an all-out grin told me well enough.  
  
“Oh… Oh, Mara, Divines, this is punishment! I’m being punished!” Just a few hours after deciding that I wouldn’t be a priest, and already I was being mercilessly smote for my decision in Nightcaller Temple!  
  
“No, no, no!” Cicero chirped. He started leading me down, deeper into the tunnel, which opened up into a small foyer and then into a wider chamber. “This is a blessing! You were sent by Mother to poor, sweet, loyal Cicero! Because you,  _you_  understand what family means, just like Cicero! But the others, they don’t know the meaning of family! They don’t know how to honor the Mother and Father anymore! Listener, he doesn’t know! But you know better than any but Cicero. Just like what you said before, oh, how much we have in common! Oh, but if only I had believed you then! If only stupid Cicero hadn’t told you not to come to Falkreath, it would have been  _you_  who heard our sweet Mother’s voice! How could I have been so blind? It was supposed to be you!”  
  
He was trembling, from rage or from emotion, I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t the slightest clue what he was rambling about, and I couldn’t find it in me to break his hold on me and run. The man in here with me was just as likely to kill me as the thing waiting for us outside, no doubt pissed beyond belief, and at least I felt like I had some chance of reasoning with Cicero. For whatever reason, he seemed to actually like me, and hadn’t tried to kill me yet. Besides that, the more I followed him, the more I realized that I actually  _did_  trust him. This was the second time that he’d saved my life, after all.  
  
“Where are we going?” I asked through vigorously chattering teeth. “Cicero, you’re bleeding. Badly. And I don’t know how much longer I can walk. If I get frostbite…”  
  
Once again, I was hushed, but it was hard to feel very comfortable when the sound was more akin to a hiss than anything else. “Down to the bottom, where we can close ourselves in. It’ll be safest there, oh yes…”  
  
“Is that thing going to come after us? Do you think it’ll break through?”  
  
“No, not the dog,” Cicero sneered. “The stupid dog wouldn’t know how. But someone else will, I can guarantee it.”  
  
“So we should get out of here!” I insisted. “We should find someplace to hide where they won’t know to look! I mean…” I licked my lips at the implications of his words. “If someone will be getting in, they would have to be part of the Dark Brotherhood. If you’re in the Dark Brotherhood, why would they want  to hurt you?”  
  
Cicero heaved a massive, mournful sigh and shook his head. “It is a sad, sad tale. A tale of a happy, happy family torn apart by a worthless, lying, heretical  **bitch**!” Another sigh. “Oh, but it all should have been so simple! I brought Mother’s body—“  
  
“You mean  _the Night Mother?_  Like the one from the scary stories children in Cyrodiil used to tell?” I couldn’t help but interrupt.  
  
“Yes, oh-ho-ho,  _yes_! The very same!” Cicero said proudly. “Sweet Cicero is the Keeper! He protects her and maintains her body, so that she can continue to guide the family from the Void. I keep her clean, and protected, and happy.” I had too many questions; I didn’t know where to begin, so I stayed quiet and let him continue on. He forgave the tangent and continued in his former morose tone, remembering the grimness of the situation and the fact that he was bleeding all over, “I brought Mother’s body to their lost, backward sanctuary. They were cold, unwelcoming, and had forgotten the Tenets! And then, the Listener!! Oh, the Listener, he  _heard_  her, and happy Cicero was so sure that everything would go back to the way it was meant to be! Back to the old ways… But…”  
  
“They didn’t want that?” I guessed. It was shockingly easy to pick up on what he was going on about now, mostly because I could tie his rambling in with what I knew from the old legends.  
  
My clown companion nodded somberly. Before he continued, however, he was interrupted by a sharp inward scream from me.  
  
Lurking through the dark, dank dungeon we were walking deeper into was a pale silhouette of a person. It turned toward us when I made the sound, and Cicero quickly clamped a hand over my mouth. For a moment, he went rigid, and I felt his grasp on me tighten painfully as the ghost and the jester stared one another down for what felt like an eternity. Then, very slowly, it turned and dissipated into thin air, dissolving right before our eyes.  
  
I waited for an explanation, and instead hot a high peel of laughter. “What was that thing?” I asked. “What just happened?”  
  
“The guardians of the sanctuary,” he explained through continued chuckling. “They always left poor Cicero alone, oh, yes they did! They know me, recognize me as Keeper.”  
  
“And they don’t mind me being here? Wouldn’t a stranger in the sanctuary be a huge transgression against your—I don’t know,  _religion_?”  
  
And actually, Cicero went very quiet while he thought about that. While he pondered, his grip on me getting tighter and tighter with each passing moment, he led me down some steps into what probably would have been the common room. The whole place was covered in ruined or rotted furniture, with a fair smattering of miscellaneous garbage on the floor. At the bottom of the steps, Cicero turned and pulled against a rusted chain, triggering some kind of mechanism in the steps. The direction from whence we’d come was suddenly blocked by an iron gate.  
  
Two more of those guardians were in this room, casting an eerie glow throughout the space and lighting our way. Again, neither moved for us, something that I’m sure Cicero noticed as well. We hurried past them as quickly as our battered bodies could go. We were nearly tumbling over our feet when we made it through a narrow hallway. Here Cicero stopped us again to bar the door behind us, hopefully buying more time or deterring anyone who he thought would come after us here.  
  
Our final destination could not have come soon enough. A wide room littered with bones seemed to be our sanctuary within the sanctuary. At the furthest end of the space, a small brazier sat, cold and quiet. There was just enough wood and charred remnants still within it for me to magical light a blazing fire which Cicero and I both loomed over as though begging to catch fire ourselves.  
  
My boots were torn from my feet, which I was pleased to see where ghastly pale and just a shade blue, but didn’t look like they would be falling off any time soon. From my bandolier, I pulled a mixture of snowberry extract and frost salts and gulped that as I passed Cicero three vials. He eyed them carefully, amber eyes seeming to flash with several emotions, questions, and accusations. A clear curl of disdain was set firmly on his upper lip, but something in his eyes told me that he wouldn’t act out. Not yet, anyway. At last he began to drink the potions, not minding when I invaded his space to begin pulling his jacket out of his torn flesh, and only then squealing in pain but never making me stop what I was doing.  
  
“It is the will of Sithis for you to be here,” Cicero decided with sudden and ferocious finality that made me jump violently. “The guardians would have attacked you. Should have attacked you! Oh, but you have the blessing of our unholy Matron, that  _must_  be it! As Cicero thought, you would have heard the binding words if you’d been there when Mother was ready to speak. But you weren’t there, and she was ready. She had to make do with what she had, and the Listener was as close to you as she would get. Such a shame… Ah, but what is done is done. Perhaps if the Listener dies, you can be the Listener after all. Like you were meant to.”  
  
I’m done with blessings, I wanted to say, but I kept that to myself. I hadn’t the faintest clue what he meant anyways. “Lift your arm so I can heal the rib better.”  
  
He hissed under his breath in pain, and I didn’t want to know what kind of obscenities a man like him would say. When he was done complaining, he continued with labored breath, “The Listener was supposed to bring the family back to what it once was! You should have been the Listener. Cicero asked if the kindly stranger heard anything, but no, she couldn’t! It just wasn’t time yet. Ugh!”  
  
“I could never be part of the Dark Brotherhood,” I pointed out. “I could never kill so many people so heartlessly. The people I have killed were… it was all horrible. I’ll never forget.”  
  
“Neither will Cicero,” he sighed wistfully, smiling a twisted grin at what would appear to be happy memories. Oh, dear. “But in the old days, the Listener wouldn’t do the murder and the slaughter, oh no! The Listener just Listened, and it was passed on for the Speakers to assign contracts. If you were Listener… Well, but you’re not. But you should be.”  
  
I just shook my head in defeat. He was a lot to handle before, but now he was just too much.  
  
“Why does the kindly stranger help Cicero again, I wonder?” he said, pretending to be just musing to himself while his eyes stared into me with curiosity. “Surely she knows what happened to the farmers? She knows exactly who and what Cicero is now… Why not just let him bleed to death? Is it not duty to family that compels you?”  
  
My hand slipped idly to clutch the hem of Missus Loreius’s cloak, and Cicero’s gaze followed, widening with a flicker of recollection. “You’ve saved my life. Twice now. I don’t know that the Loreiuses would have done anything to help me at all, but the food and clothing you took from them and chose to give to me was the difference between life and death. And again, if it weren’t for you, I would have been eaten. Or worse.” There was no denying what kind of person this clown was. No denying how dangerous and wicked and even evil he was. But in his own demented, creepy way, I knew he was somehow like me.  A twisted, broken mirror. Hearing about this strife and struggle with his siblings, and the sense of betrayal he had, all rang very close to home. Just like when I met him on the road, I knew that in our own ways, we were going through very similar things. “It’s the least I can do. You helped me, I’ll help you. Just… don’t kill me, alright? That’s not asking too much… right?”  
  
“No, no… Cicero’s blade is retired, except for gutting tenet-breaking harlots and liars.”  
  
“So that’s what you’re going to do?” I asked, turning him this way and that to get a better angle for whatever bit of him I was healing.  
  
“Hmm? What  _will_  Cicero do…? It depends on who is sent to finish me off! If it is Astrid, I’ll probably start by cutting all of her skin off!” He laughed loudly at the image, and he tried to dance, but was instantly made still again by the pain in his side and my physically turning him back to a position that I could work with. He choked on the shooting agony of the wound before continuing again in a much lower voice. “If it’s the Listener, I will… Cicero… is not quite sure what he’ll do,” he admitted. “The Listener is the head of the family, the highest authority of the Dark Brotherhood. But he has been led astray. If only he could see! Oh, Cicero would do anything to make it right, the way it’s meant to be! The old way! Oh, poor Cicero!”  
  
Our conversation was brought to a halt by a scream of metal hinges echoing through the abandoned sanctuary as the black door opened. We listened for footsteps, but only perfect silence marked the intruder’s passage. Who could be so perfectly quiet?  
  
My question was answered before I asked it. “The Listener!” Cicero breathed.  
  
“Listen to me, Cicero!” I whispered, suddenly panicked. “If it were my brother up there, I wouldn’t let his power or status vindicate him from whatever mistakes he’s made! Believe me, I’ve seen what my own brother has done, the wrongs he’s committed against the people he was supposed to protect, and I know more than anyone how badly it hurts when someone you trust and look up to disappoints you. Just like my brother, his status does not justify his faults! If anything, it sets higher standards, and if he can’t match them, then he’s not worthy of it in the first place! Let him know his shame when no one else will! Stand up for your family, and if there’s any worthiness in him, he’ll do what’s right by all of you!”  
  
In a strange way, maybe if I were far less mentally or emotionally stable, maybe I really would have ended up just like Cicero. As it was, I was completely obsessed with putting back together the shattered remnants of my mostly-dead family, meaning to force the only surviving member (who had moved on completely)to go back to how it used to be. We were two peas in a pod. And, like when I tried to convince him to take me with him when he left the Loreius farm, I was struck by how oddly parallel our lives were.  
  
The difference was that Cicero had a chance of making his family work. I believed it, with all my heart, that he could do what I couldn’t. Because his brother was coming, and Cicero would have the chance that I didn’t: the chance to make his case, prove his point, and actually convince his brother of how important it was to keep their sick, evil family together.  
  
Cicero was a strange fellow. His eyes were always moving, always sizing me up. It wasn’t like Brynjolf, and how he could pick me apart detail by detail. No, Cicero looked through me, sorting through my intentions and emotions like my soul was a book he could flip through.  
  
He licked his lips slowly, and then, with such sudden ferocity that I jumped like a startled cat nearly to the ceiling, he shrieked, “Listener?!” It echoed through the room, shaking me to the core with fear at the raw emotion in the single word. It was amazing how much weight it carried. It was his word for Brother, after all.  
  
If it had been silent before, it was like everything outside the door was utter void now. Like everything beyond the hallway ceased to exist. So, that’s the sound of someone quiet as death getting even quieter, I realized.  
  
“Is that you?” Cicero continued. “Oh, I knew you’d come! Send the best to defeat the best! Astrid knew her stupid wolf couldn’t slay sly Cicero!”  
  
“Wait, that  _thing_  was supposed to be a  _wolf_?” I whispered, shocked. I’d seen plenty of wolves, but none had made me want to run to the other side of the province to get away before.  
  
The jester ignored me. His eyes were steeled, set, ready, like a predator on the hunt. His wounds were closing, but he opened and closed his hand several times, rapidly, indicating he was ready for another potion to speed the process along. I gave him another healing elixir, and he gulped it down without blinking.  
  
“Do you think he can hear you?” I whispered. “When you yell like that?”  
  
“Oh-hoo-hoo! Cicero knows he can! When Cicero was all alone, he would yell, and wait for the sound to echo all the way through the sanctuary and back to him! It sounded like the every room was  _screaming_.”  
  
“Do you think the Listener will kill you?” I dared to ask.  
  
“He would be wise not to,” Cicero chirped. “No one else can take care of Mother.”  
  
“He wouldn’t do it? Since he’s the Listener?”  
  
“Oh, no…” At last, Cicero looked back at me, eyes flickering over my face like he was remembering something, perhaps something the Listener had once told him. “He does not have much of a reputation for… taking care of family. It must be Cicero’s job. There must be a Listener and there must be a Keeper.” Inspired, he raised his voice again to wail, “Oh, but this isn’t at all what Mother would want! You kill the Keeper or I kill the Listener? Now that’s  _ **madness!**_ </b>”  
  
By now, his side was no longer leaking any red, and the majority of it was scabbed over. “Let’s try not to let it come to that. Don’t get yourself riled up.”  
  
The sound of a metal mechanism in the walls echoed down to us, a sharp, quick noise. It sounded like some sort of trap. I opened my mouth to ask what had happened, but Cicero was already jeering, “Ouch! Pointy, pointy! My home is well defended. I always have been a stickler for details! Get it? Stick-ler!!” He burst into laughter. “Oh, I slay me!”  
  
“Cicero!” I scolded softly. “We’re trying to resolve this peacefully! What are you doing, setting up traps?”  
  
Amber eyes rolled up to the cobweb-covered ceiling and back down to me. “The traps were here long, long,  _long_  before Cicero got here! But if I’m going to keep the Listener from trying to kill me, it wouldn’t hurt for him to have less of an edge. Oh, pout all you like, but there are guardians and other things for him to deal with, too! And Cicero  _certainly_  didn’t put any of those there!”  
  
“You don’t think it might kill him?” I said. “We don’t necessarily  _want_  for him to die… right?”  
  
Cicero shrugged. “The Listener is the most important role to the Dark Brotherhood. But between no Listener and a corrupted, heretical Listener… Besides, if he dies, you could become the Listener. Should have been you in the first place…”  
  
He was cut off by an explosion, the roaring of fires, and the clangs of metal on metal. A cry of defiance, other sounds I couldn’t place, all hit us, signally that the fight had escalated greatly. Agonizing seconds went by while we waited for the fighting to stop.  
  
Then, like nothing had happened at all, it was silent.  
  
“You’re… still alive? Cicero respects the Listener’s abilities, of course, but could you at least slow down a bit?” He gestured urgently for another vial. This was my last one, and it was a damn lucky thing I even had so many to begin with. “I’m not what I used to be. Heh…”  
  
And I could see the reasoning behind his rising concern. Now, very close to us, what sounded like right down the hall where we were hiding, the grunts and banging of fighting resumed. He must have been in that common room, I realized. When all was quiet again, deathly quiet, I heard a banging and a shaking as he tried the barred door. Together, Cicero and I held our breaths until he relented, and didn’t breathe again until we heard the echoes of slow crunching under someone’s foot.  
  
“Brr! Chilly! You’ll enjoy this! Not an original part of the sanctuary, per se. Let’s call it a forced addition. Forced by what? Oh, come and see!” I couldn’t tell if Cicero was narrating for the Listener, or for me, but he looked right at me as he spoke. Unlike him, I didn’t know the layout of the sanctuary, how far away he was or how much time we had left. I was thankful to at least have some clue as to what the indistinguishable sounds I heard were.  
  
He wasn’t sounding wounded right now, just manic, so I whispered, “Are you feeling well enough to fight now? If you have to?”  
  
Cicero offered a grim nod and a huge, terrifying smile. “But we won’t let the Listener know that. Our little secret! Perhaps he’ll take pity if he thinks I’m just poor, dying, injured Cicero!”  
  
“Well, there’s at least a tactic to start with,” I agreed. I started moving the shredded fabric of his motely back into place, letting the bloody strips stick to his healed flesh so that the Listener wouldn’t see that Cicero had miraculously patched himself back up. “Your mother would be very proud of you,” I said. In my head it seemed like something he would be happy to hear.  
  
“Mother…” Cicero whimpered. I wish he would give some kind of warning before screaming in my ear. “All right, so Cicero attacked that harlot, Astrid! But what’s a fool to do when his mother is slandered and mocked? Surely the Listener understands!”  
  
Hopefully, the Listener  _would_  understand. It might be asking a lot, but the future of their family would depend on it. Cicero’s life would depend on it. Well. Mine, too. I couldn’t forget that I was tucked away with the Keeper, too, hiding by the flickering fire. I’m sure that if the Listener was indeed on the warpath, I would be no safer than Cicero. I knew from before, on the hillside under the Loreius Farm, that Cicero wasn’t adverse to physical contact, and right about now the comfort was very much needed. I scooted closer to him and leaned against him, shoulder-to-shoulder, and closed my eyes. I wanted to cry. So, so badly, I wanted to cry. I was realizing just how close I was to my own death, how seemingly unavoidable it was. How could I possibly survive the night? Even if the Listener did have mercy for Cicero, why would he keep me alive?  
  
The clown wrapped one arm over my shoulder, and I could feel him shaking beside me.  
  
Mortality changes your perspective like nothing else. I already knew that Cicero was a killer, but I was able to forgive him because, well, I’ve killed, too. I understood so much of what he experienced and went through, and I genuinely pitied him. And now, he was all I had left. He was the last person I would speak to before I died, he was the last face I would look at, the last friend who would ever care for me. He saved my life twice, and there was so very little I could do for him in exchange, it broke my heart.  
  
The echoes that reached us now had a hollow tone, ringing off of stone instead of ice. The Listener was getting closer.  
  
“You understand that Cicero might have to slaughter his brother, don’t you?” he asked me. There was mostly concern on his face, but somewhere in his eyes there was an unmistakable twinkle of anticipation. Still a murderer at heart, after all.  
  
“I understand, and I would expect you to do whatever you have to, for the good of your family.” The good of his family meant the terror and pain for their victims, I reminded myself. If the family survived, that meant they would continue to function as an organization of murder. Did I really want this? Did I really support it?  
  
Yes. Yes, I knew I did, if only because of that word and what it meant to Cicero. Throughout this night, I swear I’d seen the same look on his face that I’d worn so many times, burying my parents, looking for my brother and realizing what a monster he was. This wasn’t a criminal ring to those who were part of it. It really, truly was a family. And at least one of us deserved to have one.  
  
“And if it were  _your_  brother?” he asked, that glimmer of anticipation sparking into a small fire of mischief. Was he trying to get a rise out of me, or did he think I would have a more honest answer? The expression he wore was impossible to define.  
  
“That’s a completely different matter. If it were my brother, there could be a dozen of each of us in here and we still wouldn’t stand a chance.”  
  
Cicero hummed something under his breath, which might have been an answer or just an idle noise, I couldn’t tell. “Cicero admits,” he called out at last, still as though he were in serious pain, “he thought the Listener would be dead by now! Maybe we could just forget about this, hm? Let bygones be bygones?” What angle was he playing at here? Did he even have a plan, or was I just expecting too much from my dangerous comrade? “If it’s any comfort, I do feel slightly bad about Veezara. Stupid lizard got in my way. But please tell me that hulking sheepdog has bled to death!”  
  
Oh, I hoped for that last, part, too. If I never saw a monster like that ever again, it would still be too soon.  
  
I wrapped my arms over Cicero. “What can I do to help you?” The faintest sound, like someone breathing on the flagstones, could be heard outside. He was approaching.  
  
“Nothing to do,” Cicero breathed. “Nothing at all, nothing, nothing.”  
  
“If he hurts you, I’ll do everything I can.” Because, for whatever reason, Cicero had done as much for me. It wouldn’t last long, and it would leave me vulnerable, but I enacted an invisibility spell with what remained of my magicka and disappeared from Cicero’s side. He stayed leaning against me, and bent a little further at the waist so that he could stay at my side but hold a pose that looked like he was just hunched over in pain.  
  
“And now we come to the end of our play! The grand finale!”  
  
The door swung open, silent as the grave. Standing in the open space, like something truly out of a scary story, was the Listener himself, wrapped head to toe in black that was perfectly matte, absorbing light like looking straight into a deep, dark hole, and red that glistened like freshly-drawn blood. With his cowl drawn low, a shadow obscured most of his face, and what would have been in the light was covered with a length of vermillion leather. Tight, clearly defined muscles could be seen under his leathers, having all the look of a predatory cat readying to pounce, but his figure was still tall and slender, dignified enough to pass for a prince as much as a killer. He stalked forward, stepping with hardly a sound at all, sword already drawn and ready and held in his hand with such ease and familiarity that it may as well have been part of his arm.  
  
I have fought a dragon, and healed fallen soldiers with its breath at my back. I have been nearly killed and captured by a necromancer, robbed more times than I cared to count, escaped a city in ruins, chased by Thalmor agents, and more. I thought I had seen the most terrifying things life had to offer, if not before, then certainly the wolf on the beach was the scariest thing I would every experience in my life, right? No. Nothing compared to this, death itself walking for me. The aura of pure malevolence that permeated the room on his entrance choked me, and the grim solemnity that he carried made my whole body feel cold as ice. Invisible, I still was sure that this man would kill me. As much as I’d told myself that I would give up on my obsession with my brother, I wished he was there with me right then to protect me. Death itself would stop in its tracks for my brother, wouldn’t it?  
  
If only I’d found Thrynn after I’d been chased from the cistern. I wished I’d at least said goodbye. I wished I told him how much he meant to me.  
  
Arvid, sweet, stupid Arvid… he deserved better than me. I wished that I told him that, instead of letting him carry on hoping to change my mind one day. Just find yourself a good Nord girl, Arvid, be happy, I should have said.  
  
And Olev I wished I had known better. In the few days we’d spent together, he was more of a brother than mine had been in too many years. I wished I could have felt that kinship longer.  
  
But, undoubtedly, this was the end. I couldn’t hold up the spell for long, and I knew that I would die trying to defend myself and Cicero if the Listener chose to deal with Cicero’s insubordination with violence. Leaning practically into my transparent lap, Cicero’s whole body quaked against me. He didn’t strike me as the sort who would be afraid to die, but we both knew what his death would mean for his family—and Cicero’s family, like mine to me, was everything to him.  
  
“You caught me! I surrender!” Cicero rasped, even adding a very convincing wheezing laugh.  
  
We both sat there for what felt like ages, waiting for this harbinger of doom to say something. I leaned further over Cicero, covering him protectively with my body just a little bit more.  
  
“Oh, you prefer to listen, eh? Of course, of course! The Listener listens! A joke! A funny joke! ” His voice grew dark, as though his mood had been thrown down a well. “I get it.” I held my breath as he continued on, picking up with strained yet cheerful rhythm, “Then listen to this - don't kill me. Let poor Cicero live! I attacked the strumpet Astrid, I did! And I'd do it again! Anything for our mother! Return to the pretender, tell her I'm dead! Tell her you strangled me with my own intestines! Ha ha! But lie! Yes, lie! Lie, and let me live! ”  
  
I wanted to ask what that would solve. He was trying to hold his family together, wasn’t he? Sure, Cicero would survive, but there was much afoot in the Dark Brotherhood, and despite Cicero’s obvious madness, he was the only one apparently aware of how much was at stake. Why would he want to just run away? But, unlike before, I couldn’t stop him and ask for an explanation. I could only wait for that sword to start swinging.  
  
“I will kill this jester if you so desire, but there is a disturbance in the Void. Our Dread Father does not wish this.” Too distracted by the living embodiment of all things terrifying that was the Listener, I hadn’t even noticed the faint outline of a man behind him, much like the guardians who patrolled the halls of the sanctuary. He stood just behind and to the side of the Listener, the position of a servant, and looked directly at Cicero and I; the way his ghostly eyes took us in and looked right at me left no doubt that he knew I was there. Instead of demand retribution in death, or cry out that an interloper was in their sacred place, or anything else that would damn us, the phantom glanced to his Listener’s slowly-rising sword-arm and whispered in a voice smooth as blood-stained velvet, “The Keeper is a sacred position within the Dark Brotherhood. Ask yourself - do you trust the wisdom of our Lady?”  
  
The Listener was silent for a long time, what probably felt like a greater amount of time than it truly was while my heart pounded painfully in my chest. If he took much longer making his decision, I would just have a heart attack and he wouldn’t need to bother killing me when he got around to it  
  
Cicero’s whole body went tense, hands twitching for his dagger to skewer the Listener as the prodigal assassin adjusted his grip and lifted the blade. This was it. The Listener was choosing death! It was too much—and when the sword began its arcing descent, ready to strike—oh, I told myself I would fight him to the death, but I’d never seen anything so frightening, and I just barely screamed what I thought was my final breath—!   
  
And the Listener went still, the sword stopping just above us. Cicero’s dagger was drawn, body pushed away from me, ready to lunge at the Listener with a snarl on his lips, but they were both frozen now, stopped mid-motion as though Akatosh had broken.  
  
It felt like forever, but with a deliberately slow motion, the Listener slid his sword back into his sheath and walked backward from the room, never turning his back on Cicero. The jester, likewise, remained poised to strike, some kind of taunt right at the edge of his lips, until the assassin was out of the room and gone from our sight.  
  
We waited until the sound of screaming metal announced the Listener’s departure.  
  
“What are you going to do? They need you!” I asked breathlessly. At least, I’d meant to. But something I hadn’t felt since I was a little girl welled up in my throat the instant I opened my mouth to speak. A sob tore through me, shaking me to the core. Before I knew it, I was doubled over, fearful tears running down my face. I tried to hold my breath, to count the flagstones in the ceiling, so many things I’d done to keep from crying, but none of them could quell the overwhelming emotions. The Listener, truly the most horrible thing I’d ever laid eyes on, had almost murdered me. And, as I bent forward, I saw that tears were staining my dress: my perfectly visible dress. When had my spell stopped? Did the Listener actually  _see_  me?!  
  
Cicero did not cry, but he stayed next to me, singing songs to the bone-covered room until I calmed down enough to speak. I asked my earlier questions again, this time coherently.  
  
“Oh, Cicero will go back to his family, of course! He wouldn’t ever dream of leaving Mother behind for good, oh, no, no! That wouldn’t do  _at all_!” He shot me a mischievous smirk. “But the pretender won’t be in charge for long. Oh, how the Listener’s eyes  _glisten_  when Cicero tells him how the Listener is the highest rank a Dark Brother can attain, the greatest honor! He has no real loyalty to Astrid. Wouldn’t have minded all that much if I’d sliced her open when I meant to! No, before long,  _he’ll_  be the one swinging knives at her throat! And when Astrid is dead, suffering the wrath of Sithis for eternity, then Cicero shall come back home to take care of Mother.”  
  
“Because the Listener won’t?” I said, recalling what Cicero had said earlier. “Well, I hope the family gets everything figured out soon, before this has to happen again. And when it’s safe for you to go back, you have got to sit them all down and explain what the fuck family means! Alright? This shit is unacceptable for siblings, and if you’re a real family, you’ll all get your collective act together!”  
  
“You tease Cicero so! Making him wish more and more that  _you_  were the Listener, or that at least the Listener had your commitment to family! Such cruelty!”  
  
“I’m not teasing, I’m telling! The fact that any of you let it get this far is bullshit! I  _wish_  I still had a family left to salvage, but I don’t. Don’t you dare let this chance slip, do you understand, Cicero?”  
  
The twisted mirror image of me gave a dutiful nod, but his face was turned up in a grin somewhere between maniacal and jovial, and just a few shades off sinister. “Oh, of course. Mother needs me, after all.”


	20. In Which She Gets a Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ever wonder where Cicero goes between the events of the quests Cure for Madness and Hail Sithis? Brina's adventure continues as she gets the hell out of Dawnstar and seeks a little bit of peace and quiet in a city that hopefully won't try to kill her one way or another. And this time, she's got a full posse to protect her from her own misfortune!

### Chapter Twenty

I mopped up the wetness on my face, but long after my tears dried, I stayed close to Cicero. For the next few hours, I helped him repair the tears in his outfit while we sang lighthearted songs, as though the near-death experience hadn’t happened at all. It took that time to get my breathing back to normal and my nerves back from the very edge. And, though I knew him to be a crazed killer, Cicero still did nothing to make me feel like I was threatened in any way. On a few occasions, he suggested I follow the Listener back to Falkreath, because it was clearly the will of Sithis that I join the Brotherhood. I took it as a compliment (since I knew, from Cicero, it truly was), but dismissed it every time.  
  
That kind of family just wasn’t for me. At all. Definitely no.  
  
“Well, you’ll never hear our Lady’s voice if you keep your hands over your ears!” he exclaimed.  
  
“Sorry, but killing just isn’t something I can get behind as a profession.”  I held his jacket out to him, all in one piece and only a little bloodstained. As he pulled it back over his corded body, I added, “Besides, between the Listener and that werewolf, I don’t know if I’m a big fan of the family. You don’t scare me witless, but there’s no way I could sit through a civil family supper with those two without soiling my underclothes.”  
  
His nimble fingers laced and tied his jacket faster than my eyes could follow, and so natural was the motion that he did it all without looking; instead, his amber eyes watched me, flickering through a whole gamut of expressions like they so often did. I could never, ever tell what he was thinking or feeling, because never did his emotions stay stable long enough for me to properly place them. But, while his eyes were filled to the brim with mystery, his smile remained firmly in place in a clear expression of mischief and humor of some joke that I wasn’t being let in on.  
  
“Alright, alright! Oh, this must be how Mother feels, dealing with you! So much to say, so much to convince you of, and you would just refuse to hear any of it!”  
  
“You’re incorrigible. Now, that should last you until you get a hold of some better quality thread.” I’d been forced to shred up the bottom of Missus Loreius’s cloak to have enough thread to repair all the tears in his motley. The irony wasn’t lost on me, but I wasn’t about to ruin the outfit from Ama Nin that I wore underneath. “Where are you going? You can’t very well stay here, just in case some of that family of yours comes sniffing around again for any reason. And you need to lay low until this Astrid woman is dead, since you’re so sure that’ll happen soon anyway.”  
  
My jester rolled back on his heels and followed the backward sway of his body into a fluid back handspring, landing in a cross-legged, pensive pose as comfortably as if he’d been sitting like that many minutes. One elbow rested on a knee, and his chin dropped into his palm. All at once, his mercurial mood clouded over into a definitive dark cloud of worry. “Oh, poor, poor Cicero can’t think of where to go!” he bemoaned dramatically. “He’s all alone in this cold, unforgiving world! Not a friend in sight! All by himself… except his little sister!”  
  
“No. Cicero, I am not part of the Dark Brotherhood, I am not your sister in any way. And besides that, I do  _not_  want to get mixed up in any more of your family drama than I already have! I’m happy to have helped you, and I wish you the best, but if I’m anywhere near that Dark Brotherhood crap, I know I’m bound to die way sooner than I planned.”  
  
His eyes widened. His chin quivered. Damn him, tears were welling in his eyes.  
  
“Stop it. Stop right now. You are a grown man, and you are not fooling me.” A lone tear rolled down his cheek, as though he’d choreographed its fall, complete with a helpless little sniffle. Damn professional. “I know what this is. This is manipulation. Believe me, I wish I could help but I don’t even know where to go right now! I don’t have a family or home or anything! I’ve got even less direction than you do! We’ll be of no help to each other. Besides, wasn’t it you who said I wouldn’t last long with you? It would get ‘messy’?”  
  
“That was before Cicero knew you would be the Listener!”  
  
“But I’m  _not_  the Listener!!”  
  
“Not with the current one still alive, no, but that’s just a matter of time, if it’s the will of Sithis!”  
  
“No! You won’t change my mind!”  
  
“No one else knows what I’ve been through!” he wailed. “The betrayal, the loneliness! Cicero is all alone, and the only person he can trust would turn him away! Oh, woe is Cicero! Fie this pitiful life! Sithis take me!”  
  
  
_First Day of Second Seed,_  
_Dear Brother,_  
  
_You wouldn’t believe what’s happened to me the last few days! I’ve completed a quest for Lady Mara herself, and denied her, Sanguine, and Vermina all of my worship. Then, I was informed that I had the blessing of Sithis, but I’m not so sure I really believe that, and I certainly don’t want to. What I do know is that I faced a temple full of orcish raiders and Daedric worshippers, hid in the empty halls of an abandoned Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary, and knelt under the blade of perhaps the most dangerous and evil man in all of Skyrim!_  
  
_I can’t believe that all this happened to me! And looking back, I’ve seen some incredible things since coming to this land. I’ve been part of amazing feats, and I’ve met wonderful, beautiful people. For every moment of horror or pain, I knew joy and love and laughter. If I ever choose, I know I have a home in Whiterun waiting for me, and a list of suitors wanting me, not the least of which is the future captain of the guard! I have friends who would be thrilled to have me make my home in the Grey Quarter of Windhelm. I’ve made a home for myself in Riften as well, and though that one is lost to me forever now, I’m confident that if I can find a place in a den of thieves, I can find one anywhere._  
  
_How could I ever have thought I was once homeless? That little farm in the shadow of Kvatch was just a farm. Skyrim is my home now. No, not just Skyrim. The whole world. The whole universe! My place is wherever I so choose. I don’t want to drag you back to Kvatch. I don’t want to end your stupid adventures, but most of all, I don’t want to end **mine**. No, not that I want to keep running headfirst into danger, or fall from any more high places. But these feelings, I don’t want them to end. And the wonderful people I’ve known, I don’t want to stop meeting!_  
  
_If you could see me now, would you even recognize me? Sure, my hair is still a messy nest of black curls, and I’m still skinny and weak. But if you looked into my eyes, would you see the same girl?_  
  
_I’m not alone in this world. And just as my life has been saved and changed so many times by the kindness of others, I will do the same. For someone as lost and alone as I once was, I will extend my hand._  
  
_In I guess at least some ways, he is like a brother to me, after all._  
  
“Olev… this is Cicero. He’s going to be traveling with us. Not for very long! Just until we get to the next town. And that’s all.” Oh, dear, his scar was getting all bright red like did does when he got angry. “He’s a friend of mine. And he’s promised that he absolutely won’t kill either of us.”  
  
Instead of a proper greeting that might have eased Olev’s rising temper, Cicero dropped into a bow so low that his nose touched his knees, then flew back up to full height (which was laughably short compared to the monstrous mercenary) with a grin wide enough to take in his ears and wicked enough to plant nightmares in the hearts of children.  
  
“Can I talk to you? Privately?” Olev said, his voice dangerously low.  
  
“Uh, right… Cicero, why don’t you stay here?” I asked, hoping that he wouldn’t wander away. Dawnstar wasn’t a large town by any means, but it was cold and people were already staring at our curious group, all gathered outside the inn. I didn’t want to come back to find Cicero missing… or to find that townsfolk were suspiciously missing, either.  
  
“I will remain in this very spot until you tell me otherwise. Spiders could eat my face off and faithful Cicero would not move an inch!”  
  
We trudged through the snow, leaving Cicero to stand idly in front of the inn. Passing citizens gave him a wide berth as they walked around him, but rather than stay where we could keep an eye on him, Olev led me around the corner of the inn, into the small yard.  
  
“The man is insane. He’s got the eyes of a killer, and the smile of a monster. We’re leaving. Right now. Without him.”  
  
“What? No, Olev, he’s all alone! He’s had a falling out with his family, and he just needs to get out of Dawnstar for a while, until things quiet down with his siblings. That’s all! No crazy killing or anything!”  
  
“Damn it, this isn’t a game! He could kill you!” Olev took my hand roughly, and started to pull me to the back of the yard, where we would make our escape. If he wanted to, he could have thrown me over his shoulder and run, and there’d be nothing I could do to stop him short of setting him on fire. But his pull was gentle, pleading rather than forcing. “I wouldn’t trust him with you.”  
  
“I’ve already spent the night with him before, twice, both the times I’ve crossed paths with him, and he hasn’t done anything to hurt me!”  
  
If Olev had been upset before, his jaw dropped so fast that I feared it would pop from its hinges. “You  _what?!_  With  _him?!_ ” he cried out. Then, noticing his volume, he dropped into a fierce whisper, “Alright, the fact that he’s a lunatic aside, you would sleep with  _him_ , but not me? Twice?!”  
  
“You’re like a brother!” I protested.  
  
“With that brother complex of yours, I would think that would get your smalls off in a snap,” he sneered bitterly.  
  
“What?! No! Ugh! And I didn’t mean that I slept with Cicero! I didn’t! That would be…” I recalled the scene in the Loreius farm, and quickly shook it out of my head. “…messy…!”  
  
“Ew—”  
  
“No! I meant—stop! What I meant is that I’ve been able to sleep, helpless and vulnerable, and he hasn’t done a thing to harm me! In fact, he’s saved my life twice, and I mean to return the favor. He needs this. If nothing else, I just want to be there for him. He’s been through a lot, and he doesn’t have a home right now. I know how that feels as much as anyone, having no home or family to care for you when you need it the most. Please, let me do this for him. If not until he can go back with his family, then at least until we can find him a safe place to stay until it’s all resolved.” I placed my free hand on Olev’s, over the one that gripped mine desperately. “You don’t have to come, if he bothers you that much.”  
  
“Over my dead body will I leave you alone with him!”  
  
A bone-chilling peel of laughter erupted just feet from us. “Oh, but Cicero can oblige, if those are the terms!”  
  
He was not helping his case one bit! “Cicero, go back over there! Just wait for us to talk this out, okay? And no, you absolutely cannot do anything to hurt Olev. You promised! Your blade is retired and all that, right?”  
  
The jester rolled his eyes and kicked at the snow, but plodded back around the corner, grumbling under his breath all the while.  
  
The mercenary squeezed both my hands in his, bright blue eyes seething behind his practically-glowing red scar. “The blood on your dress; if a drop of it is yours, if he so much as touched you—“  
  
“He’s only ever helped me. Just like you.”  
  
“Not like me. No. And, to make it clear, if he ever lays a hand on you—“  
  
“Then you can do whatever you feel you need to. I trust you as much as I trust him.”  
  
His grimace told me that he took offense to the comparison, but he made no further arguments. Instead, he called out, “Alright, let’s be off! Before I change my mind about leaving him here. I suppose you know where we’ll be going?”  
  
Cicero bounded out of the shadows to join us, and the three of us started out of the city in a row, heading down its only road. “Actually, I’m not so sure. I’ve decided not to become a priest of Mara, and I’m not on good terms with the Thieves Guild, so I don’t think going back to Riften is in order. If we go to Whiterun, I may never want to leave. Windhelm I don’t much look forward to going back to… Maybe west…”  
  
“Well, anything west is probably out of the question, since any other city would be under Imperial rule. You’ll want to stay away from any place the Thalmor are moving through freely,” Olev said.  
  
That was a good point. As much as I hated Windhelm, it was probably the safest place to keep from crossing paths with the Thalmor again. I didn’t know what they were up to, but I definitely did not want to find out. “Maybe—what’s the city way up north? Winterhold?”  
  
“That road is high risk and low reward, unless you want to join the mages’ college,” Olev said, “which may not be a bad idea for you. Otherwise, the city is mostly a ruin surrounded my some very dangerous wilderness.”  
  
So the only city I wanted to go to would be Whiterun. I heaved a sigh, considering everything that would come with it, though. I imagined Arcadia’s disapproval at traveling with two men, especially men who she would consider far from marriage material. And, of course, everyone would be surprised and disappointed with me for turning away from priesthood before I’d even started. Then there was Arvid, and just thinking of him made me feel a little queasy. It was the closest thing to a home I’d had in many years, but unlike Brother who could walk back into Kvatch with his head held high no matter what mischief he’d gotten into, I just couldn’t stand the thought of the embarrassment that would await me.  
  
And if embarrassment in Whiterun would be bad, imagine the absolute mortification that would greet me in Riften! The priests would be appalled by me, and the Guild would rip me to shreds if they found out I was in the city again.  
  
“I think I just need to lie low,” I relented. “I need to not have people trying to hunt or kill me, just for a little while.”  
  
“Not likely,” Olev grumbled. “But that’s why I’m staying with you. I take my eyes off of you for a few minutes, thinking you’ll just be praying to Mara for a bit, and I next see you a day later, caked with blood. You don’t stay out of trouble, Brina.”  
  
“If I can’t go west, and almost every city east is a proverbial snake pit,” I groaned, “can it be that Windhelm is actually my  _best_  option? The Gods are cursing me. I knew it. This is just my luck.”  
  
The responding looks of appalled shock I got from Olev and Cicero both brought me some much-needed perspective. To be honest, my luck was phenomenal. Sure, I got into all kinds of trouble, but in the last couple of days, even months, I’d narrowly escaped some horrible fates that should have claimed me. Somehow, I managed to survive walking the dangerous line between incredible fortune and disastrous misfortune.  
  
We spent the day on the road, moving at an easy pace with no real fear of Thalmor or other dangers. Olev, a true Nord, was perfectly confident leading us off the main road and through the snowy wilderness. Since the majority of our supplies were strapped to Olev’s back, Cicero volunteered to carry me when my leg began to ache, insisting that he lived to serve. While he was much smaller and shorter than Olev, he held me firmly and carefully as he carried me, and I was once again reminded how much I trusted the maniacal little clown. In fact, my weight hardly seemed to bother him at all, and he delighted in impressing me by performing some intricate footwork and dance steps without so much as jarring me against him. His grace and skill was something to behold, and I often found myself leaning over his shoulder to watch even his normal gait as he pranced to an unconscious iambic rhythm.  
  
When we stopped to rest for the night, out tent pitched right at the bottom of a cliff, I realized that there was a little more complication to traveling in large groups than just the possibility of not getting along. Anoriath’s narrow tent had initially been for just one person, first him, then me. Shared between Olev and I, and there was no privacy or space to speak of: we’d been cuddling the whole night through, and there was simply no way to avoid it. Now, with Cicero, I wasn’t so sure how we’d fit at all.  
  
Well, we did fit, after much uncomfortable shifting and several failed attempts. Nearest to the flap of the tent, taking the protective position should anything need to be chased away, Olev lay. Then, with my back to his front, I came next in the procession. Finally, his back to my front, Cicero slept right against me. Sleeping close wasn’t nearly as intimate as facing death together, certainly, and I’d been this close with Olev before, but being sandwiched tight between two men like this had a way of making my skin feel especially flushed and my heart race against my ribs. Arcadia would have steam pouring out her ears if she could see me like this!  
  
Olev wasn’t too pleased with my close proximity to Cicero, either, but the jester had pacified him by very deliberately calling me sister every chance he got, assuring my big Nord protector that he had no questionable intentions for me when the sun went down. It made my skin crawl, the way he seemed to think of me in terms of his dangerous, evil family, but I quieted my misgivings by reminding myself just how well he meant by it. After all, to him, could there be any greater compliment than the belief that I was a worthy sister, or the rightful Listener?  
  
But the first night, when all was finally quiet and we’d stopped struggling for a comfortable arrangement, I was immediately thankful for the end result. Tucked between their two bodies, I was nice and warm, easily able to forget that right outside there was an ever-growing blanket of snow. Olev had thrown one arm protectively over my shoulder while Cicero softly hummed in his sleep, over all creating an atmosphere that reminded me even in slumber that I was defended on all sides. Woe to any bandit that tried to attack us in the night: I had no doubt that either Olev or Cicero would tear the whole tent down for the chance to get at a thief on the outside first.  
  
Weather permitting, we would make it to Windhelm in four days. In less convenient circumstances, it might take five days to a week, maybe even more. So, with that in mind, we were determined to make as much distance as we could before the soft flurries of snow had the chance to grow into anything more substantial.  
  
“Brrr… Chilly!” Cicero complained. Even if he was softly singing to himself, humming, or making idle chatter, Cicero could never leave silence unbroken for long. “I do hope Windhelm is more exciting than this. The snow just goes on and on and on… Stupid snow.”  
  
“I’m perfectly fine with nothing exciting happening for a change!” I argued. “I’ve had more excitement than I can take lately!”  
  
“Ohh, maybe a dragon will attack Windhelm! That would be something!” the clown crowed.  
  
I suppressed a groan. “It would be something. It would be the death of me. Come on, don’t you just want to relax a while? You nearly died, too!”  
  
Leave it to a member of a murder cult to have a nonchalant attitude about near-death experiences, though. In fact, at the mention of almost dying, Cicero appeared to grow even more bored! “Wish he’d  _dared_  to swing at Cicero…!” he muttered under his breath. “Then Cicero would have shown him who’s scary!”  
  
“Besides, while we’re there, we can look for my brother. It’s been a while since I was there last, maybe he’s come through since then. Maybe he’s there right now!”  
  
For once, Cicero didn’t have anything to say. His lips pursed shut, amber eyes darting to me quickly, looking for something on my face that I must not have shown before going back to the empty snowdrifts ahead.  
  
“I thought you were done with him,” Olev pointed out.  
  
“Oh, I still have a few things I’d like to say to him!” I said. “And I still need to see him. I don’t know what I’ll say, or what I’ll do, but I’ve come this far. And as long as I don’t know where else to go or what else to do with myself, finding him is still as good a mission as any, right?”  
  
Neither of my companions seemed very convinced, but neither were going to say anything. The expression on Olev’s face was clear disillusionment: he’d already told me how he felt about my brother and my search, and he’d given up in telling me to just stop trying altogether. Cicero, meanwhile, had that constantly-changing visage he so often wore, so it was hard to tell just what he thought of it. All that remained constant was the purse of his lips, as though he was consciously reminding himself to keep to himself something he so desperately wanted to say.  
  
That night, the weather turned for the worst, and I was more thankful than ever that I had bodies on either side of me to keep warm with. My magical fire and an obliging boulder formation kept us from getting snowed over or frozen, but we awoke to a whiteout and spent the next day trudging through knee-deep-and-rising snow. Our pace slowed, and it took several days to get to the Nightgate Inn.  
  
By the time we arrived, my leg was inflamed and badly hurting, so Olev ran ahead to make arrangements for beds and hot baths while Cicero hopped along with me whimpering on his back. “Shush-shush, little sister, we’re almost there!”  
  
“I’m amazed,” I wheezed over his shoulder, sending a wave of frosting breath over his face. “I think this is the first time Olev’s left the two of us alone. He must finally be starting to trust you.”  
  
The proclamation made Cicero shake with laughter that slowly dropped to a low, menacing chuckle. By now, I knew better than to think too much about what he might have been thinking about to draw that sort of response from him.  
  
“Before you say anything creepy, remember all the promises you made,” I warned.  
  
“Oh, you can certainly trust faithful Cicero!” he insisted, gasping as though such a proposition was entirely uncalled for. “Cicero just thinks it’s funny that you and that big bull would trust Cicero quicker and with more ease than his own sworn family would.”  
  
“That seems more sad.”  
  
“Mm-hmm, that’s what Cicero said. Funny!  _Hilarious_!”  
  
“No, I said — alright. Funny. I know what you mean.”  
  
By the time we made it into the small inn, Olev had rooms rented and food waiting for us next to the fire, as well as promises of a bath in hot water. All of my dreams were coming true at once! With a face full of horker stew, my hand itched toward the flagon of mead that had been set out for me on the table.  
  
“What’s the matter?” Olev asked, watching my internal battle.  
  
“It’s been… a pretty long time since I’ve had a drink,” I admitted, my tongue wetting my lips in desire of the sweet nectar right in front of me. It wasn’t since I’d told off Sanguine that I realized what a drinking problem I’d developed. I’d never been called a drunk before coming to Skyrim, and at first it had just been Arcadia scolding me for partying in the guard barracks late into the night, which I had just written off as protectiveness. But then, in Windhelm, Ambarys and Malthyr both called me a drunkard. That was written off as well, this time because I was living in a tavern and naturally enjoyed the exotic Dunmeri drinks with the locals. They all drank their troubles away every night, and I just went along with it! At least, that had been my justification. Then, in Riften, I spent most of my time in the Ragged Flagon, drinking and being merry with the thieves. This time, none of my antics seemed like much of a problem, since I really was just as bad as the others in the guild, and many were more reliant on drink than I.  
  
But how many times did I fall into a drunken stupor to not remember getting into trouble with Sam the next day? And how many times, in moments of trouble and pain, did I only wish for some mead or ale to wash my sorrows down with? I never thought of myself as an alcoholic, of course, but having a flagon set right before me made me realize just how natural it would have been to reach for it… and another after. And a third. And however many more it took to bring me right back into Sanguine’s waiting arms.  
  
The flagon that so taunted me was moved away by Olev’s uncaring hand and drained into his mouth in an easy gulp. “There. Feel better?”  
  
“No,” I huffed, now feeling not only parched but personally affronted.  
  
My mercenary rumpled my already-wild hair and stood from the bench, plodding back a moment later with a small jug of milk.  
  
“I appreciate the gesture, but I can’t drink that! All the tough Nords in here will make fun of me!”  
  
“That’s what you’re concerned about? Brina, rest assured, you don’t need to be seen literally drinking milk for every proper Nord to scoff at you.”  
  
“I want to  _try_  to be taken seriously!” I whined.  
  
“Then grow a fucking beard. Until then, no booze, and now that I know, I’ll be sure to keep an eye on you.”  
  
Now it was my turn to scoff. “Not that I mean to, but what exactly can you do to stop me if I do want a drink? Are you just going to drink every pint of ale in Skyrim?”  
  
“No, but I figure punching you in the stomach to empty you would make enough of an impression the first time that I doubt I’d ever need to again.” At my incredulous expression, Olev actually dared to smile back at me. “That’s how much I care about you, Brina. I’ll break your ribs any day.”  
  
“Will you be trying that before or after you try to bed me?” I sneered.  
  
“Ha! A fistfight over mead and then a roll in the hay? Say anything else so Nordic and I might just fall in love with you!” When I blanched, Olev’s laugh rose to a hearty guffaw, and he smacked my back hard enough to slide me forward on the bench and into the edge of the table, winding me. “Oh, don’t give me that! I can assure you, I could only love a true Stormcloak Nord woman. For you, well, you’ll have to make do with being a sister of sorts.”  
  
“A sister you want to sleep with?”  
  
“No one’s making you put it that way, Brina, but yes. Why, are you offering something? Just say the word—”  
  
Over the sound of my jug of milk splashing across Olev’s face, I could barely hear Cicero say behind me, “And they call me crazy…”


	21. In Which She is Snowed-In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ever tried walking through the arctic wilderness? Arctic wilderness filled with monsters and dragons? "Fast travel" is a silly lie, and it's a slow-going, dangerous road to Windhelm. And when they get there, what will they find?

### Chapter Twenty One

 _Eighth of Second Seed_  
_Dear Big Brother,_  
  
_I thought weather was supposed to improve in the springtime! It’s a good thing it never got this bad when I was fleeing Whiterun in the winter, or I never would have made it! The storm has taken a turn for the worst, and the rising warmth of the atmosphere is meaning that these huge and growing snows on the mountains and hills are coming down violently. Apparently, many of the main roads have been covered by avalanches, and one would be a fool to try going even on the safest routes with hypothermia and death a thousand other ways too real a threat._  
  
_It’s worse than when I was snowed in at Bruma. The inn is full of travelers, and without enough beds, they’re sleeping in the cellar and on the floors. Olev, Cicero, and I have been forced to share a single room. It’s still more room than that tiny tent, but tempers are running short, and I fear for my companions’ lives should they make the other finally lose patience._  
  
_The boredom is driving me mad. I can’t drink, lest Olev do something to embarrass me or somehow interfere, and I’m thankful, truly, for his commitment to my health. But if there’s any time I could use alcoholism, it’s when I’m trapped in an inn in the middle of nowhere. So instead of drink the days away, I’m practicing my healing magic on the frostbitten travelers who stumble in. I’ve been borrowing parchment from the innkeeper, and have been compiling alchemical notes—not that I don’t know it all by heart, but putting my knowledge to paper is certainly helping to pass the time._  
  
_Gods willing, we can be on our way to Windhelm in a few days. Gods not willing, I may just witness a funeral here._  
  
  
If Olev was protective of me on the road, it was nothing compared to how he wouldn’t take his eyes off of me in an inn packed to the brim with frustrated, angry Nord men. Most were traveling merchants, but many were Stormcloak soldiers and recruits who’d been forced to wait out the storm before returning to Windhelm. I felt safe and sure that no one would do anything to harm me since I was one of the few making myself really useful in the tumult. Every illness, every minor injury, every case of frostbite or infection was promptly dealt with, and when I could get a hold of some alchemical supplies, simple potions were made and distributed to the needy snow-ins.  
  
Why would anyone do anything to hurt the one healer in the building? I asked.  
  
Olev had been less than enthused to explain to me that I was one of two women in an inn filled with bored and angry men, and an Imperial in the midst of dozens of staunch Stormcloaks.  
  
“If that’s all it takes to make men go crazy and slaughter me, what makes you so different? Is my being Imperial just too repulsive for you?” I teased.  
  
Olev was having none of it. With a roll of ice-blue eyes and a sweep of his hand through unkempt tawny hair, he grumbled, “I can control myself. Unless you want me to ravish you, in which case, say no more. But until then, I know how to handle myself. This lot I put less faith in. Lot of young, hot-blooded soldiers who’re cooped up in an inn instead of out on the battlefield where they’d like to be? That spells trouble any way you look at it. Throw a pretty girl in, who happens to be a loyal Imperial, and you’ve got yourself a bad joke, plain and simple.”  
  
“Give them some credit, Olev. I mean, weren’t you a Stormcloak? You didn’t go around attacking innocent ladies.”  
  
“Yes, I was, but only briefly. Then I became a mercenary, which should say even less of my character. I don’t make a good example.”  
  
I paused, mulling that over in my mind for a while. “Why would you do that? You had an emotional, ideological, cultural, and religious reason to fight for Ulfric. Why did you just drop all of that to be a common sellsword?”  
  
To my surprise, Olev’s face cracked into a wide smile that set his grotesque scar crooked on his face. He was far from offended by my description of him. “I have nine siblings. Nine. And my mother is a widow. I needed a way to send home money, and being fodder for a rebel’s army is not the way to do it. As a mercenary and bounty hunter, I could expect enough to live off of and enough to send back to Markath to keep my family comfortable. Sure, I had all the thirst for revenge and was a son of Skyrim through and through. But gold is gold, and my mother can’t buy bread with vendettas.”  
  
As much as I’d liked to have brushed off his concerns as paranoid, I noticed Cicero behind me on more than one occasion, and felt a second pair of footsteps behind me stop dead in their tracks. His crazed grins were long and pointed at particular people in the crowd, as though he could see the highest concentration of animosity in the room innately, and would proceed to stare them down until I saw a figure slink into the throng and out of sight. And once, just once, I woke to a horrible garbling sound right outside the door of our room, and saw no Cicero beside me. In the morning, a gangly Nord man sported dark bruises around his neck and avoided me like the plague. Cicero was bubbling over with cheerfulness that morning as well. It was easy enough to put the pieces together on that one.  
  
After almost a week, I couldn’t deny that I was in significant danger here, but I wouldn’t admit that it was true, either. I played diplomat, pretended to be completely blind to the little power struggles around me, and hoped it would just… I don’t know. I guess I thought that if I ignored it, it would all just go away. The mounting stress and paranoia made it even harder not to drink, but I knew that, should I indulge, I would be in that much more danger.  
  
With my luck, I was sure it was going to take a turn for the worst. Someone was going to attack me, someone was going to snap, and blood would be shed, I was sure. How could I possibly sit in this snake nest for days without a single bite? But, while I steeled myself for some inevitable disaster… none came. Sure, certain people would get into fights here and there, but nothing ever went further. Cicero, true to his word, stayed his blade, and Olev only left men with broken noses at the most. The injuries no one asked me to heal were the ones I realized had been dealt in my defense by one of my two boys, and before long I was taking comfort in the sight of black eyes and bruises.  
  
Why did I never travel with companions before? Not fearing for my life at every turn was quite nice!  
  
Other than my motley little group, the one other person who showed me surprising kindness was an orc man who generally kept to himself. Amiable but otherwise not very social, he seemed only to speak to me, and usually briefly, stating that he preferred privacy. I never asked him any questions, keeping conversation very trivial and casual, which I suppose he must have appreciated the most.  
  
As soon as the roads were clear enough, we left. In fact, we were the first to leave at the first signs that the storm was letting up, much to the innkeeper’s relief. Since I was the eye of the storm of enmity in the inn, no doubt he saw my departure as the best way to diffuse the tension that was building in his poor establishment. If I stayed much longer, we all knew that it was only a matter of time until someone was found dead.  
  
And, just as one would expect, what was clear enough to travel was not necessarily easy-going roads. The storm subsided for the most part, but flurries still fed the mountains of fallen snow, which continued to melt, flooding the tributaries into the River Yorgrim. We moved slowly, always conscious of the cliffs and mountains around us in case an avalanche came down on or near us. To say that we were uncomfortable was an understatement, but after being cooped up in that inn for so long, it was the most thankful I’d ever been to be out in the frigid weather.  
  
My magical flames accompanied us almost always, so long as I could keep a steady flow of magicka through my hands. And by night when we set up camp, I indulged in turning our humble campfire into an inferno that we could feel through the thick hide of our tent. Snuggled together in that tiny, narrow tent, it felt almost like home. An itty bitty home.  
  
No, it wasn’t like my home in Whiterun, with Arcadia who had become a mother to me, or the welcoming brothers Anoriath and Elrindir. And it certainly wasn’t like my home in Windhelm in the New Gnisis Cornerclub, or in Riften down in the cistern. But in its own way, it was a home. Warm, surrounded by people who would literally (and happily) split skulls to protect me, I was safer than anywhere else in all of Tamriel.  
  
What should have been a few days was turning into weeks. And weeks. Another five days were spent from the Nightgate to Windhelm, with a longer rest that was strictly necessary at the mill I had stayed at once before. I wasn’t in any hurry to get back to that awful place. The dunmer, I liked. The slums, I liked. But everyone else? The Storcloak soldiers all over the place? The xenophobic, uncaring Nords shouting about elves and empires? That, I most certainly didn’t miss. I took our massive delay as a clear sign.  
  
“Windhelm is the worst place in all of Skyrim,” I declared on our last night on the road. It had been a long, slow journey, and we were tucked in our small tent, stooped over double under its low top as we gnawed on tough horker jerky before sleep. The tent was open on one side, keeping snow and wind out and letting the burning blaze of fire in. I had to sit practically in Ciceros’s lap for us all to fit sitting. “The gods have been slowing us down out of mercy, so we don’t have to suffer it just yet.”  
  
“It’s not so bad,” said the Stormcloak, his head grazing the roof of our tent despite how low he hunched down.  
  
I made sure that the roll of my eyes told him how much I thought his opinion was worth.  
  
“The Dunmer are nice,” he added pointedly, and this time he caught my attention.  
  
Come to think of it, he was the only other person who knew me as Brina Stone-Cat outside of the New Gnisis circle. “You must have spent some time in the Grey Quarter,” I began leadingly.  
  
Thankfully, Olev was quick to indulge me. “As soon as I left Shor’s Stone, I went back to Windhelm. Couldn’t help but ask around about you, since you were the insane little Imperial who willingly gave the man out to kill your brother a bag full of precious gems when just weeks before I watched you starve and go without a bed on the carriage ride. But no one I asked seemed to know anything, except that you’d been caught and nearly killed by the Butcher, escaped by the skin of your teeth, and had been obsessed with tracking down the Dragonborn. Then that Dunmer in the market piped up, mentioned that you’d been living in the Grey Quarter. Once I started asking around there, everyone knew all about you. Talked about you as though you were a Dunmer like them, practically. And they kept calling you Stone-Cat.”  
  
“It started as a joke, and became a new name,” I confessed, blushing at the memory. Remembering the happy times in the little tavern certainly did help me to look forward to returning, at least.  
  
It didn’t last long, since Cicero’s curiosity was piqued by the mention of my brush with Windhelm’s notorious murderer, and I recounted that tale much to Olev’s clear discomfort.  
  
Soon, we were bundled up and dozing off in a pile. Both men seemed to be squeezing tighter than usual, to the point where I could hardly breathe, especially with Cicero’s mop of orange hair in my face. Olev’s arms were around my waist, which was unusual and uncomfortable since his whole body was like rock around me. But safe and warm, I couldn’t very well complain, and while anyone else may have been kept awake all night, I drifted into a peaceful slumber to the sound of crackling fire and the steady breaths of my equally-at-ease companions.  
  
Rather than the light of dawn waking up, however, an infernal roar that shook earth and sky sent each of us upright. Cicero was the first to bolt out of the tent, leaving the hide wide open to allow me a look at the snowy wilderness being burnt around us. I came next, right on Cicero’s heels, as Olev cursed his ebony armor that he was already halfway through strapping on.  
  
Months passed since I’d seen my first dragon. This one was another fire-breather, screaming gouts of fire as it swooped overhead. We were close enough to the city for there to be people around and on the road, so from our campsite we saw roadside guards waving to one another, no doubt hollering orders to one another. I couldn’t hear, but from the direction they were running and the gestures they made, it looked as though they were trying to keep the dragon engaged away from Windhelm.  
  
Not that I don’t see exactly why they would want to keep the dragon from burning up the city and all its people, but my Imperial imagination did so love the image of Ulfric the Dragon-Shouting traitor locked in battle with the beast.  
  
Cicero was gone as soon as he exited the tent, taken with the wind with a taunt on his lips as he barreled through the snow and wilderness between our camp and the road. I tried my best to keep up, but couldn’t move as fast when my eyes were always turning upward to follow the reptilian monster’s path and making sure that no flames would engulf me should I unwittingly walk into its breath.  
  
There was little we could do so long as it remained circling us in the air. The guards fired arrows into the air, but more often than not did they fall back into the snow with a muffled plop of disappointment. I added my own assault to the mix, sending a crackle of lightning that had many of the Stormcloaks, until then unaware of my presence, jumping in surprise. I sent bolt after bolt into the air, and smiled with satisfaction for every time that my magic made contact and sent flickers of light up and down the scaled thing’s body.  
  
Then it dropped. Out of the sky, like one of the moons had lost its hold on Oblivion, it plummeted down with terrifying speed. The ground only slowed it, and it dragged across the snow, breaking trees in its wake and carving up the earth in a path of destruction.  
  
And who should be waiting for it at the end of its journey? Why, my two boys, of course. Olev was swinging his axe with abandon at the monster’s face while Cicero leapt over the huge Nord mercenary, skipping across its spine and dropping down atop it to pierce one wicked dagger directly between its plated armor and into its soft flank.  
  
I heard the guards around me swear and follow it off of the road while the archers readied a new volley to arc over the charging force.  
  
And, as much as I wanted to pelt it with more destructive magic, there was no way I would accidentally harm the guards, and Gods forbid I should hit Cicero or Olev! I ran after them in pursuit, instead directing my magicka toward my fellow combatants, bolstering them and steeling their courage with a rally spell. In my left hand, I readied a healing spell, and prepared myself to play field medic as I had in m first battle with a dragon.  
  
Truly, it was a fearsome thing. Its scales lined its body in an armor so beautiful, sleek and dark and intimidating like looking into a million facets of Oblivion. Its eyes were sharp, and each time it glanced my way I felt my very soul get pierced by its gaze. And the way it growled, its words rumbling the whole world and shaking my center of gravity, was made only more horrible by the way its voice manifested itself in waves of smoke and fire.  
  
And yet, I wasn’t afraid. Having seen one once, and since then being confronted by a multitude of other horrors, I felt oddly prepared. This dragon was nothing compared to the Listener, or Mercer Frey accusing me of being a traitor, or escaping the Butcher of Windhelm. And when I realized I would so much rather dive into the fray here than against any of those people, when that small corner of my mind not occupied with spells and tactics made that observation, I knew I had nothing to fear.  
  
I had faced a dragon before, and killed it. I had faced death itself walking toward me. With my boys and a legion of soldiers, there was no way this dragon could take me down!  
  
My rallying spell dissipated from my grasp like a puff of smoke, replaced by primordial cold that swirled between my fingers like a miniature blizzard. If this dragon was moving into the region because it thought the storm had let up was about to be sorely disappointed, when all at once I unleashed a furious stream of icicles. Fear of accidentally hitting Olev or Cicero melted away; I wouldn’t hit them. I followed their movements in my peripheral, watching them and the guards swarm the dragon, and timed each blast to hum between the bodies like arrows let loose by a Bosmer in the Valenwood canopies. Some combatants startled or stumbled, but none were so much as scratched. Yet each found home against the dragon. Many exploded into harmless shrapnel of ice and snow, but a precious few gauged the creature deep. While the hope had been for a couple to sink into that vulnerable space where the scales meet, I watched in fascination as one deadly-sharp spear of ice sunk straight through one of those impenetrable plates, shattering it to reveal wet, bloody flesh below.  
  
A few of the Stormcloaks hooted upon the development, but their cheers were drowned out by the defiant roar of the dragon. Snapping its jaws at any too close, I watched my confidence disappear with the crunch of armor and spray of blood. Olev narrowly missed it, scuttling backwards out of its way, but a woman dressed in Ulfric’s blue found herself caught in the monster’s maw, her life brought to a quick but painful and horrible end.  
  
Well, that certainly deflated me. Feeling far less certain of myself, I startled to reel backwards myself, only to find that the dragon was approaching me. Massive claws dug deep into the frozen ground, dragging its wounded body closer to me while I could barely recall what a spell was supposed to  _look like_ , much less how to cast one, my magicka and confidence both dangerously low. I was moving away from the group, but not toward the road, instead tromping blindly through the snow to barely dodge wicked teeth.  
  
My life flashed before my eyes. It did! Really it did, no matter how many times Olev says it’s just an old superstition that you see your life before you die! Any moment, I would step into a snowdrift and the dragon would eat my in one gulp! But instead, I saw in the corner of my eye a little red and black figure, running with a crazed grin on his face.  
  
“Cicero! Help, I can’t cast anymore!”  
  
The lunatic jumped right in, between me and those jaws, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing away without a second though to just what sort of situation he was putting himself in. The dragon recoiled, but only for a moment as it reassessed its opponents: no longer just a single female, but a fiery, fearless little man as well. Maw open, it wasn’t going for a bite this time. Deep in the back of its throat, the beginning of a word came alive with the flicker of embers.  
  
Cicero acted before I could even think to, his dagger flashing black as night one moment, and glowing red in the heat the next as it flew right into the open mouth.  
  
If he cared about losing his pretty dagger, he certainly didn’t act like it, because the sound of the dragon roaring incoherently in pain and frustration was matched by his maniacal laughter.  
  
My magical reserves were recovering, and it was just enough for me to throw a burst of ice at the dragon, pushing its head away from us. And, instead of turning back on us when it recovered, it flicked its whole body around shockingly fast. Without Cicero to grab me and pull me roughly to the ground, I’d have been knocked senseless by its tail.  
  
“What’s going on?!” I gasped. A stray arrow disappeared into the snow beside me, though, effectively informing me that the guards were back in the fray. And, above all their shouts, I heard Olev’s booming voice above them all. Cicero’s black glove caught my hand and pulled me up, and pulling me along like an excited child, he led us around the dragon’s flank back to the action of the battle. While I wanted to argue that being right in front of the angry dragon was  _not_  where we should want to be, Olev’s voice bid me to him just like it did when I heard him locked in battle with the bandits south of Dawnstar. To let him face this foe without me was out of the question.  
  
He wouldn’t be getting any more scars on that scary face of his if I had anything to do about it!  
  
When I saw him, I blanched. Gods, how does he get himself in these situations?! His axe was caught, buried deep in the monster’s snout while it tried miserably to speak despite the dagger caught in its larynx. So, instead of shouting fire at my dear Olev, the dragon was shaking its head, swinging Olev right round. The steadfast Nord held his stance, refusing to be thrown into the air, but he stumbled side to side while growling and tugging back, tearing a huge hole down the middle of the dragon’s face.  
  
On either side of Olev, Stormcloak soldiers fired what remained of their arrows or cut at its hide, and the archers without ammunition stood to the side, marveling at the battle taking place at the madness before them.   
  
I don’t know what I thought I could accomplish, but I ran to Olev’s side and wrapped one arm tight around his midsection, as though my scrawny frame could actually anchor him down. My free arm let loose a torrent of ice and wind, ripping into the many open wounds already spotting its face and body. In time with my spell, Olev chopped his axe downward, cutting through the thick scales and bone to break free at the bottom of the snout, pulling shards of bone and teeth out with it and painting the snow red. The huge opening in its face caught the brunt of my spell, turning its face and exposed mouth and throat to ice.  
  
Olev swung his axe around and back down, beating it hard against the space between the dragon’s eyes, crushing the compromised bones there.  
  
Two for two. Two dragons fought, and two battles survived and won. It wasn’t just the drain on magicka that had me swooning and swaying like I’d had too much sujamma. Adrenaline from the fight was still pounding through my veins in time with my sputtering heart, even as the last of the dragon’s life disappeared from its glowering eyes. All I wanted was to crumble on the ground.  
  
“Does anyone have any potions left?” one guard called. Now that the fight was over, the Stormcloak soldiers were regrouping, assessing damage, and gathering their fallen.  
  
Did anyone have potions? Well, these Stormcloaks may have been traitors and rabble-rousing hypocrites, but I sure had potions. I was drinking an elixir to restore my magicka to do some healing by hand as I walked over to them and began passing out vials. “Here, take all you need. I have more, too. Who has the worst of it?” I asked, bringing glowing rays of healing energy to life in my palms.  
  
I healed and bandaged, mended cuts and brightened bruises, and passed around potions while Olev and Cicero busied themselves with carving the dragon’s throat open to retrieve the jester’s thrown dagger.  
  
None of the Stormcloaks had anything bad to say about me being an Imperial milkdrinker while I stemmed their bleeding and closed their wounds.  
  
And long after Cicero’s dagger was recovered, and my boys had gone back and packed up our camp and returned to me, I was still healing, shooting magicka potions in quick succession to keep up with the demand.   
  
“You’re going to hurt yourself, pushing your magic so far,” Olev scolded as they came up behind me. A big ebony claw came down on my head, ruffling up my hair, while Cicero plopped down on the ground beside me, dropping his head onto my shoulder.  
  
“I’m a healer and an alchemist. It’s what I do.”  
  
“Even for Stormcloaks?” Olev teased.  
  
“I’ve healed you, haven’t I? I heal Stormcloaks, scoundrels, and lunatics alike. I don’t have to agree with their worldview to do what’s right.”  
  
Cicero snorted something under his breath, but didn’t taunt me outright. My big Nordic monster of a man mussed my hair one more time, then tapped my shoulders impatiently until I was finished with the blue-clad archer in front of me.  
  
Finally finished, and thanked profusely by the guards and soldiers for our help in slaying the dragon, we walked with them the rest of the way to Windhelm. Weeks spent stranded in the Pale and the slow move across Eastmarch made me sigh in relief to see the bland stone fortress rising over the White River, despite knowing that I truly hated the city over any place I’d been in all of Tamriel.  
  
“What ever became of the Butcher?” I asked our Stormcloak escort.  
  
“Old Calixto, the crazy Imperial?” a heavy accent answered me through the thick steel of his helm. “He was killed in prison. Bloody, awful mess, too, but nothing compared to the horrors he committed himself, so no one really mourned or felt any guilt.”  
  
“The irony was lost on the entire city?” I asked, less than amused. Olev gave me a stern elbow to my ribs.  
  
Another Nord in Ulfric’s blue standard said, “Not at all. But no one was going to say anything, since we all know it was the Drago—“ This time it wasn’t me who was shushed by a stern jab from a companion, as the Stormcloak was immediately silenced by two of his comrades.  
  
I knew exactly who he was talking about anyway. “Why did he do it?” I asked tentatively, feeling strangely uneasy. Did he know about me? Did he know I was here in Skyrim, looking for him? Did my Big Brother kill him to avenge me?  
  
Olev muttered something under his breath, something about how it was too little too late, and how he should have protected me to begin with, which meant that he’d guessed my own train of thought, and wasn’t impressed by the possibility. On my other side, Cicero gripped my hand unnervingly hard.  
  
“No one really knows,” the Stormcloak who had spilled in the first place continued. “No one actually  _saw_  him do it. But Andres says he heard Calixto trying to make his case to the Dragonborn, talking about how he did it for his sister. I guess that wasn’t a good enough reason for the Dragonborn, because he got mightily upset. I thought I could hear him telling Calixto what-for from the barracks, and that night come and find out that Calixto was dead in his cell, the door unlocked and swinging wide open.”  
  
Oh. Somehow, I couldn’t place how I actually felt about that, but my hands were starting to shake a little. Maybe it meant he had no sympathy for Calixto, as he had long since forgotten what it felt like to be a brother himself. Maybe he took offense to how Calixto dishonored his sister's memory. Maybe, like everything else in my brother’s life, it had nothing at all to do with me.  
  
Crossing the bridge, I stayed tight between Olev and Cicero and kept my eyes straight ahead, not looking down. It’d been a long time since I took a fall, and wouldn’t tempt fate here.  
  
“Did he ever say anything about any of the victims?” I asked leadingly before the guards went their own way upon entering the city.  
  
I could imagine the quizzical looks they were all giving me behind their steel helmets well enough. “I heard he bedded Suzanna the Wicked, but other than that, I don’t think he had much to do with any of the women. Mind you, we can’t exactly say it was him who did it. No one saw anything.”  
  
Well, at least that much was definitely out of the equation. He didn’t do anything because he knew I was a victim of the madman, let alone that I was even in Skyrim. “I understand,” I said through a lump in my throat. Olev was already steering me by the shoulders toward Candlehearth Hall.  
  
“Of course,” the guard added, turning away, “the Dragonborn did buy the house Calixto was using for his rituals. The one he got caught in. It was a little strange.”  
  
I pictured my brother taking his breakfast on the table beside the patchwork of human remains I’d awoken to, and my mouth tasted like bile.  
  
“What are you doing to yourself? Is this some kind of masochism? What do you care why he did it, or where he is? Brina, you’re better off without him. He’s a sociopath who’s never done a damn thing for you,” Olev told me as he pushed me into the inn unceremoniously, letting the wind slam the door behind us.  
  
“That is not masochism. Cicero knows about  _real_  masochism, he can tell you—“  
  
“I don’t need you to tell me that, but he’s still the only family I have left, you know. You don’t have to say it like that…!” Why was my voice quaking?  
  
“Anyway,” Olev continued, ignoring Cicero entirely, “we’ll rest here for a while, but we are not here to look for the Dragonborn. I don’t want you to keep putting yourself through that. I think I have enough gold to pay for a few rooms and for us for a few days, and then we’ll need to pick up some work. Nothing insane, just some easy mercenary work to pay for board. And we’ll keep that up until you feel ready to go back to Whiterun, or wherever we find out will be relatively safe from the Thalmor chasing after you.”  
  
“Mercenary work?” I choked. “I thought we came here to stay out of trouble! What happened to the four thousand Septims I gave you?”  
  
“I sent most of it back home to Markarth,” Olev said with a shrug, as though it should have been obvious. “Why would I just carry that sort of wealth around? Besides, do you know how much money I spent on food and beds for us at Nightgate Inn? Just because we were trapped doesn’t mean that was all free!”  
  
“How much money  _you_  spent? Four thousand Septims worth of your wealth is mine! You told me to send you  _five_  thousand to keep you from murdering my brother! I believed you!”  
  
I could hear the innkeeper stomping her way over to us, saying something sternly, but too quiet to be heard over our yelling. And I must have looked ridiculous, shouting up at a man in ebony armor a full two heads taller than me, spitting vicious as a sabrecat, but I wouldn’t back down.  
  
“I never said I wasn’t going pay you back, and I didn’t expect you to take the bribe in the first place! It was a joke! It’s not my fault you’re so fucking gullible! And besides, I know very well how much I owe you! I left behind the Riftwold Shields and a fortune in jobs just to play bodyguard for you! You’re costing me a lot more than four thousand Septims out here when I could be doing real work!”  
  
Cicero was between us before the innkeeper got close, glaring Olev down with a glower that could set a troll on fire.  
  
“Then why are you even here?” I spat. “Why waste your time with me? Just go on your stupid little adventures and get all the gold in the whole world, if that’s all that matters to you!”  
  
“Sister, I think you’re speaking words meant for someone else,” Cicero hissed into my ear.  
  
“Are you comparing me to your brother?!” Olev shot back. “I was happy to give up my place with the Shields for you! I give a fuck about my family! I am nothing like that murdering piece of shit—“  
  
If not for Cicero, I would have dived at the Nord, throttled him. But, with the Keeper between us, I was held far enough back that even my clawing hands couldn’t get any purchase on his slick black armor. The innkeeper arrived to stand in front of Olev, shouting at him for all of us to get out of her inn.  
  
All things considered, it’s pretty amazing that we didn’t have a fight like this in the time we were confined together during the snowstorm. Still, it didn’t cool our tempers getting shoved out the door and into the snow, where we continued our yelling match, Cicero pulling me away from Olev all the while and demanding that we stop fighting or he’d cut our tongues out to make us.  
  
“You’re being insane, Brina! You’re letting all this with your brother get into your head! Listen to yourself!” Olev hollered.  
  
“So your crazy brother killed another crazy killer who tried to kill you,” Cicero said into my ear, sounding much more reasonable than the red-faced mercenary I was still trying to claw at through Cicero’s grasp. “It’s funny, when you think about it. Sure, Cicero knows how emotional murder can be. You’re confused and hurting, and you don’t even know why. Cicero knows all about that. But sweet Little Sister has her brothers here to protect her.”  
  
I sniffed indignantly. “That’s not it at all! We started fighting because of money—”  
  
“That’s exactly it,” Cicero snapped.  
  
“We know you well enough by now to know you only get this upset over your brother,” Olev pointed out, simmering down. The burning red began to drain from his scar. I guess when Cicero is the cool, collected one of the group, it makes the rest of us realize how out of hand we’ve gotten. “It’s not about mercenary work or money. You want to find your brother, but you don’t want to see what sort of messes he leaves in his wake.”  
  
“I already know that he’s not the perfect hero I used to think he was.”  
  
“But you don’t want to fear him,” Cicero said. “And now, he is the man whose brutality and matches that of the Butcher who did such naughty, naughty things to you.”  
  
I felt my stomach clench at the very thought, and I was sure I would be sick. How was Cicero so perceptive with these things?! “I don’t want to talk about it--!”  
  
“It’s alright,” Olev said. “We’ll just make Windhelm a quick stop. Resupply, rest, and be on our way. And we’ll stick to the Grey Quarter. Alright?”  
  
Nodding weakly like a child coming down from a tantrum, I let Cicero take my hand once more as Olev led the way toward the slums of the city. The dirtier the streets became, the more dilapidated the buildings, the more at home I felt, and the Butcher and my brother faded into the background.  
  
“I could really use a drink,” I sighed.  
  
“Ha, what, did you think I’d feel bad enough after our tiff to let you?”  
  
“No, I guess not, but…” My eye strayed down to some barrels stacked up by the corner club. In one discreet corner, the wood was marred, as though unintentionally knocked against a stone or another barrel. But I recognized the strange little pattern, what was supposed to look like a meaningless accident. It was a vague round shape, with a sharp square indentation in the center.  
  
It was a shadowmark, miles from Riften, far from where the guild was supposed to operate.  
  
“But I could really, really use a drink.”


	22. In Which She Fall Off The Wagon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Windhelm, as seen through the eyes of a very drunk Imperial lady. Brina may be trying to overcome her affinity for booze, but it's her willpower versus Sanguine's. And to make matters all the worse, what she sees in the City of Snow does nothing to strengthen her resolve.

### Chapter Twenty Two

Was I expecting Ambarys to be pleased to see me again? Well, I certainly recognized the widening of his eyes and the little nod he gave me. It was early evening, late afternoon, so no one was drunk yet, which meant the surly Dunmer were their typical closed-off selves, and I couldn’t expect a boisterous welcome. But he was pleased to see me, that much I could see through the thick veil he wore over his emotions.  
  
Was I expecting him to be pleased to see me come in with two men trailing behind, asking if we could sleep on the floor upstairs like I used to? No. I knew better than that. If he hid his joy at seeing me walk in, he certainly did not hide his derision at the request.  
  
“Please, we’ll be quiet and we won’t snoop around!” I promised, leaning over the bar the way Niranye did when she didn’t feel like paying full price for a drink, shoulders slumping in a weak attempt to press my breasts together. It was a joke and I knew it. There was nothing there.  
  
Naturally, Ambarys didn’t so much as glance. He just frowned at me, not the least bit amused, lips pursed as he pondered which obscenities would best express his absolute apathy for my plight. Scarlet eyes kept flashing to Olev angrily, as though silently asking what I was thinking bringing a Nord into his establishment in the first place.  
  
“And we’ll pay!” I added. “We have some money, we can pay you!” We’d already been kicked out of Candlehearth and told not to come back. This really was our only option, unless I wanted to knock on the door of Hjerim and see if my brother’s housecarl would let me stay in the house I’d almost been murdered in.  
  
Luckily, the offer of money meant a whole lot more to Ambarys than the pathetic display of barely-visible cleavage I’d been putting on. As long as Olev stayed on the far side of the bar, Ambarys let his cool demeanor warm up, until it was with a rare smile on his face that he offered me the little space upstairs for the three of us for a tenday for the same amount that would have bought us beds at Candlehearth for two nights. It sounded like a great deal when not taking into account that we would be sleeping on a broken floor in a drafty attic.  
  
The more time I sat opposite of the New Gnisis proprietor, the more his icy shell fell away. In an hour, he was leaning over the bar, chuckling about some gossip, and insisting that he give me my first mazte back ‘home’ free of charge.  
  
And oh, how it ached when I parted my lips to refuse! Between my frustrations concerning my brother and that damned shadowmark on the barrels down the street, I wanted a large mug of mazte right then even more than I wanted to meet a Telvanni wizard. “I can’t have very much,” I whispered at last, praying that Olev was too far away and too deep in his pouting to notice I’d been given a drink. “I’m not supposed to drink anymore. I really shouldn’t… but I need it. Badly… Did you hear that my brother killed the Butcher?” My voice cracked at the end. “Maybe I should feel like justice was done, but knowing what he would do, and to know he’s capable of competing with that monster in terms of cruelty…!” The guards said that the scene inside the cell was sickening and almost on par with what they found inside the abandoned house.  
  
“Say no more. We heard that Calixto was found dead after a less-than-friendly debate with the Dragonborn.” He poured half of the tankard he’d offered me into a different mug, and lifted it to his lips while I thankfully took the other half to my lips.  
  
“This is all I’m going to have,” I said, and Ambarys nodded. “Don’t let me have any more.”  
  
“I consider it a privilege to share your only drink with you. I won’t let anyone take the honor away from me.”  
  
I missed the flavor of the saltrice beer, and the way it filled me with the warmth of a faraway volcano. But, knowing Olev could only stew in the corner for so long, and that Cicero wouldn’t be able to hold his attention forever, I drank it quickly and pushed it right back to Ambarys, who immediately hid the evidence behind the bar while enjoying his own half of the drink at a much more leisurely pace. Weeks without drink made the mazte go to my head quickly; it was just a small amount, though. Olev wouldn’t notice a thing—  
  
But when I looked over to the corner, to be sure that my big Nord wasn’t heading over to tear me a new one, I nearly startled out of my chair. Olev was perfectly distracted, chin in his hand and eyes downcast, counting cracks in the table’s surface. But beside him, two amber eyes bored into me with such intensity that I couldn’t quite remember how to breathe. He sat there, staring at me, perfectly motionless, nostrils flared. He gripped the table in front of him, his knuckles white. How long could he go without blinking?  _Why wasn’t he blinking?!_  
  
“So, Ambarys,” I said, turning with an uncomfortable smile plastered on my face. “How are things? Is everyone doing well?” Try as I might to ignore it, I could still feel those amber eyes burning twin holes in the back of my head.  
  
The barkeep shrugged, and set about wiping down tankards in preparation for the rush of business that would come with the fall of the descent of the sun. “The same as always, I suppose. Stone-Fist doesn’t come around anymore, so the whole Grey Quarter has been getting better sleep. Suvaris is still working for Nords, and Brunwulf Free-Winter has actually convinced someone in the Palace of Kings to at least increase guard patrols down here, at least to a bare minimum. Niranye’s business is booming recently, and under somewhat suspicious conditions—but don’t let anyone know I told you that.”  
  
“Lively as always, then?” I asked though a smile.  
  
“More or less. But what about yourself? You’ve turned up rather unexpectedly, and with some new friends. Did you find your brother?”  
  
“No,” I sighed with a morose shake of my head. “I still have every intention of tracking him down eventually, though.”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“Otherwise, things have been… Well, better and worse. My friends are a bit on the scary side, but they’ve been good to me and have kept me from any more Butcher-like incidents. I was chased out of Riften by the entire Thieves Guild.  I’ve almost become a priest of a Divine, and turned that down. Almost became a priest of a Daedra, turned that down.” Trying to ignore Ambarys’s deepening frown of confusion, I continued, “And then I rescued a jester from a werewolf and other things, and then I walked through a blizzard. And here I am!” And that was the short version.  
  
After several moments of sitting, brows raised as though waiting for a punch line, the dunmer shook his head slowly and hissed a sigh through clenched teeth. “Brina Stone-Cat, adorable as a kitten, dumb as a rock, and the single most unfortunate thing I’ve ever witnessed. And I watched the Red Mountain blow up.” Ouch. “And what are you doing here, then? Why not go somewhere else? Anywhere else, really. I wouldn’t be in this Divines-forsaken city if I didn’t have to.”  
  
“Funny you should ask. I can’t really go west, or anywhere under Imperial rule. The Thalmor are sort of hunting me. No clue why.”  
  
His tongue dragged across his lips and, apparently finding nothing to say to that, shook his head again.  
  
“But I’m excited to see everyone again!” I chirped, changing the subject with a little less grace than I had hoped.  
  
“They’ll be thrilled to see you, too. Are your, ah,  _friends_  going to be with you all night?” His red gaze shifted, and I was forced to follow his line of sight back to my boys. Cicero, still staring back at me, was studiously ignoring Olev, who anxiously alternated between tapping on the assassin’s clenched fingered and waving his hands in front of Cicero’s amber eyes, trying to pull him out of whatever trance he was in.  
  
Hm. Come to think of it, as much as I loved my peculiar pair, they probably wouldn’t mesh well with my Dark Elf friends. And, if I could get them distracted, or at least out of the cornerclub, I could enjoy some sujamma like I used to!   
  
Running into Sanguine in the flesh taught me a valuable lesson about moderation, and I wouldn’t let myself get out of hand! I could keep myself under control and have a good time! Of course I could! The way my throat went dry and my mouth watered at the thought of having more to drink made me sure of it!  
  
“Olev?” I said, and his head turned dutifully to regard me.  
  
“Cicero’s not responding to anything,” he started, “and I don’t think he’s blinked for minutes. He might go blind if—“  
  
“Cicero will be fine. I think he just needs some air. Why don’t you guys go out to the market? Get some food, browse the stalls? I’ll bet that’s exactly what he needs!  Maybe you can even look into some of that mercenary work you mentioned before? Just some nice diversions to keep his mind occupied.”  
  
“Occupied?”  
  
“You know. On peaceful, simple things. Things that aren’t along the lines of homicide or arson.”  
  
Blue eyes flashed back to the jester’s face, still frozen in an expression that suggested rage and worse.  So focused and tense, I expected blood to spurt out his nose any moment. “Yeah. Maybe that’s a good idea. Come on, clown, let’s get you some fresh air.”  
  
The massive Nord led Cicero all the way out of the cornerclub, but he never let his burning eyes off of me. Before the door swung closed, I swear I saw his thin lips mouth something that looked like a threat.  
  
But it was okay. Probably nothing. I was just reading too far into it.  
  
“That should keep them out of the way for a bit,” I murmured through a growing grin. That smile doubled when a fresh mug of mazte clunked onto the bar in front of me.  
  
Just a little bit to drink, that was all. I’d be in control.  
  
  
I can’t recall at what point the paralyzing thought occurred to me that Olev would be back soon, and he would see me in this condition. Had I gotten out of control? No, no, of course not! Because, even though my surroundings were spinning in the most beautiful kaleidoscopic ways, I could still stand and walk, thank-you-very-much! Well, not that I didn’t stumble considerably when standing abruptly out of Revyn Sadri’s lap, but that was because of my head-rush—being drunk had nothing to do with it.  
  
Because I wasn’t drunk. Nope, not a chance, because I decided that I wouldn’t go down that road again! But Olev wouldn’t think that. He would get upset and disappointed, and he would make me go to bed and groan about how much trouble I was!  
  
So, I had to escape the cornerclub before my boys got back! It made perfect sense! I was swaying to the door as quickly as I could, so they couldn’t walk in before I’d escaped.  
  
I heard a voice say behind me as I wandered out say, “Where in Oblivion are those two going?”  
  
“Let them go, she’s probably looking for a place to lose her stomach. Better she do it out there.”  
  
Joke was on them, I had no plans to vomit, because I wasn’t drunk! No, I was just slightly intoxicated, going for little stroll before Olev came back and could get upset with me. The snow made my feet drag and made me veer from one side of the road to the other. Frozen flakes of snow drifted down in dizzying patterns that turned my stomach, which was very strange indeed, because I was sure I wasn’t drunk!  
  
But in my definitely-not-drunken stupor, I eventually decided that an obliging stack of crates would make a good place to rest for a minute. There was just a little flush to my cheeks, sure, I could admit that, so I would just let it fade away and then go back to the cornerclub, and Olev would be none the wiser! Just as I settled at the base of the stack, however, a horrible sight caught my eye. Another circular marring and an empty square indentation at its center. First of all, I so-soberly thought, no shit everything in the Grey Quarter would be empty! You don’t go to a slum expecting wealthy citizens to rob! But my second thought, one that turned my stomach painfully, was that the barrels I’d spotted earlier were not a coincidence. If someone took time to put shadowmarks in the obviously poor part of town, then they must already have picked apart the rich neighborhoods. The guild wasn’t just present, they outright occupied the city!  
  
I did not throw up behind those crates because of the mazte. It was just the stress of the situation. But I clearly couldn’t go back to the cornerclub now, because if Olev returned by now then he would see how ill I looked, and he would start accusing me of things. Best if I let the night air clear my head before returning, I decided.  
  
Shuffling up from the depths of the Grey Quarter, icy wind carrying my hair in all directions, I wandered deeper into the city, all the way past Candlehearth Hall and toward the Palace of Kings in all its cold, stoic glory. Flurries of snow drifted down in spirals, dancing to the tuneless song that the wind sang through the stone corridors of the city. I hated Windhelm, but the scene before me was perfect, with smoke rising in plumes like warmth breath from braziers set about the square. Guards dressed in Ulfric’s blue looked frigid as the icy flagstones, making them blend into the architecture like living statues surrounding the grounds.  
  
Minutes passed in divine silence, spent watching the snow fall endlessly, sighing into steam when it fell into the fires or settling into the blanket of snow that already covered the ground.  
  
My meditation was broken when a shadow contrasting sharply with the grey skies and white caught my eye. High above the little courtyard I stood in, on one of tiered rooftops on the eastern wing sprouting from the castle proper, a lithe little form stalked across the roof, followed by a trail of slinking shadows in her wake. I glanced around to other vantage points, and sure enough, silhouettes dotted the nearby roofs and walls as lookouts. Far back, sitting at the zenith of Candlehearth, a single figure was seated, faintly outlined by the glow of magicka. That was my old position, providing magical support, and they weren’t doing a very good job of it if I could see them through the snow in the dead of night.  
  
But it was certainly a high profile job. At least six thieves in all were in on the infiltration, with one taking the vanguard. Another figure crouched at the bottom of the wall, wrapped in a burlap cloak, pretending to be a beggar but no doubt was waiting to bail the infiltrators out should events turn sour. Whatever they were after, it was valuable, and the stakes were high to have this many thieves in on one job.  
  
Holding my breath, I felt myself leaning forward in anticipation as I watched the vanguard infiltrator, definitely Vex by the perfected pace and graceful footwork, dart along the rooftop and the other thieves, those who weren’t in place as lookouts, follow in her footsteps. Though they made no noise, memories of my time among them filled in what my senses couldn’t pick up: their slow, controlled breathing as they took measured steps, the slickness of the tiles beneath them, the softest squeak of the roof adjusting to their shifting weight. The smiles they flashed one another with every victorious stretch of distance.  
  
They made it all the way to the junction between the wing and the main palace in excellent time, with no signs of slipping or making too much noise. Down below, the guards were entirely oblivious, chatting over a brazier.  
  
“The cold’s been makin’ my knee ache like none other!”  
  
“Gah, quit your whining! Your knee’s been healed for years!”  
  
“No amount of healing or potions’ll ever fix it! Shot straight through the bone, cracked the whole knee cap into a million pieces!”  
  
“Pft! If it were so bad, you couldn’t walk!”  
  
“I didn’t say I couldn’t walk! It just acts up in the cold!”  
  
“That’s nothing. I hear my cousin got eaten by a dragon.”  
  
“The one you were so jealous of? Got to go fight dragons while you had boring ol’ guard duty?”  
  
“Not jealous anymore…”  
  
In the relative quiet of night, the snap of a lockpick rang through the air like a Septim dropped from the top of the castle. And, to make matters that much worse, a broken piece of the pick flicked out, falling past the clamoring hands of the infiltrator. It bounced with a ringing note on every tier of the roof, then down to the ground where it plopped into the snow. How a little tiny chunk of iron be so noisy?!  
  
And what was that sentry on the roof of Candlehearth doing? He should be on this, making a distraction, anything! Was he too far away that he didn’t realize what sort of disaster was brewing across the castle grounds?  
  
For a single, heart-wrenching moment, silence followed while the last echoes died. The guards turned their heads, and started toward the wall, and I leaned further forward, meaning to reach out, to say something—  
  
No words came out, just a garbled cry of shock as I fell forward with perfect gracelessness.  
  
The soft snow did very little to cushion my fall. Luckily, I didn’t feel much between the numbness of my face and the ice, so the stone that knocked against my head had none of its usual solidity. In fact, I swore I felt the whole ground give way a bit under the force of my fall. My hands were pins and needles, up to the wrists in snow as I tried to push myself back up, but I slipped against the slickness of the slush, and dropped to my face yet again.  
  
Over my own heavy breathing and frustrated grunts, I heard the crunching of footsteps, and felt dread rise I my throat—no, no, that was bile, but I was still worried. They were going to investigate, to slaughter my guildmates, and here I was, useless as a fish out of water!  
  
I turned my face, thinking I would see the thief positioned on the ground moving to intercept the guards and give the team on the roof the chance to escape. But instead, I saw him still there, bundled under his burlap cloak. Barely-discernible eyes flashed between me on the ground and the direction of the guards, but although he was visibly tense, he took no action.  
  
What was he looking at? What was going on? Why wasn’t he doing anything? And if the guards weren’t looking into the broken pick, what were they walking to?  
  
A crunching noise by my head made me jump, and I must have truly looked like a flopping fish on a dock.  
  
“Get her off the ground. She’s going to freeze,” one guard said, the one with the bad knee.  
  
“Me? Why me?”  
  
“Look at her, she might be sick! I don’t want to touch her if she’s got some disease.”  
  
“And why should I touch her, then? Besides, she’s not sick. You can smell the booze on her. Girl’s drunker than a skeever in a mead barrel, that’s all.”  
  
“That’s all? She can’t move. And I’m telling you, she’s going to freeze like that.”  
  
A boot against my skull turned my head up from the ground. Above me, the guards were looking down, their features entirely hidden by their iron helms. “If you care so much, then move her. People freeze all the time. She’s just an Imperial, who cares?”  
  
“Can’t just let a woman freeze to death right outside of the Palace of the Kings. It’s not right.”  
  
“But not enough of an injustice for you to pick her up yourself?”  
  
“She could still be sick.”  
  
“She smells like a rancid tankard, but she’s not sick. This is drunkenness.”  
  
“Feh. You would know. Fine, I’ll carry her myself.” He paused with his gauntlets on my shoulder and hip. “Where should I put her?”  
  
“In the dungeon. She can’t go passing out in front of the palace.”  
  
“Ugh. I don’t want to deal with that. If she throws up in a cell, Brynja will make me clean it.”  
  
The second guard groaned, and his voice got further away. “Well, you can’t just knock on doors until you figure out where she lives. And if she can string a sentence together, I’d be surprised.”  
  
“Better that than to let her die, you know.”  
  
The man sitting on the ground, playing beggar, stretched out, drawing the attention of the guards. Still in position, he appeared finally at ease. I glanced up to the roof and saw no trace of Vex or her team. The threat had passed, and my inadvertent distraction had been their ticket inside. He was talking to the guards, but I could barely hear him, let alone make out what his low, husky voice was saying.  
  
“Thanks for the tip, but I think I’ll take her myself,” the guard grumbled, finally taking a grip on me and throwing me over his shoulder roughly. He grunted something about his knee, yet I felt no danger of being dropped. He had a firm grip, and a solid build, and even though the world was spinning violently, I felt very secure.  
  
“All the way to the Grey Quarter?” the other guard scoffed at a part of the conversation I hadn’t heard. “You’re on duty! Just let him take her if he knows where she’s staying.”  
  
“I’m not about to hand a helpless girl over to some wretch on the street. I don’t want any woman to freeze as much as I don’t want her to get raped or killed. If that means I have to carry a piss-drunk Imperial down into the Dark Elves’ slums, well, it’s part of the job.” It was actually very noble, and reminded me a little too much of my sweet, stupid Arvid back in Whiterun. Then everything began to move around me, the entire world bouncing in time with the guard’s steps. I tried to thank him and to apologize for being a burden, but I couldn’t even make sense of my own babble as it rambled from my lips. Every once in a while, he would brush the accumulating snow off of me, but the majority of the time his steadfast grip stayed firmly and chastely on my legs and back.  
  
“Tsk, tsk, tsk!” I heard a voice chirp behind me, in the direction the guard and I were headed. “Lost, and found, but not without such bother! Oh, little sister, you do know how to put sweet Cicero into such a worry!”  
  
“Is she yours?” the guard asked dryly.  
  
“Yes, my dear, sweet little sister at last returns! She’s not supposed to drink, you see, it’s a bad, bad habit of hers, but alas, her Dunmer friends do so love to share their drinks with her. When we got back from the market, she was gone, and we searched, high and low and up and down! Hours and hours!  
  
The guard hummed, not quite sure how to respond to the tittering Imperial jester before him. The sound of shuffling in the snow told me my clown was dancing, and that no doubt put the guard off even more. “No wonder she’s not supposed to drink. She passed out in front of the palace. Was just standing in a daze one moment, flat on her face the next. Thought she’d freeze. Uh, here.”  
  
I was passed from the guard’s shoulder and into a waiting pair of velvet arms. I snuggled my freezing face into Cicero’s collar, and despite the pleased smile he wore, a menacing hurricane boiled in his amber eyes as he looked down at me. His hand looped under my knee pinched me painfully, and I meant to scold him, but it came out as a rather lukewarm meow instead.  
  
And the journey began once more as Cicero lugged be through the dark alleys toward the cornerclub. This time, I was facing straight ahead, and had no idea what Cicero was going on about when he stopped abruptly and sang, “If one more step you dare to follow, I’ll carve your chest out, nice and hollow!” He took another deliberate step forward. “If my sister you try and chase, sweet Cicero will cut off your face!”  
  
Another step, and another long pause. The slightest crush of snow far off made Cicero’s hands clench around me painfully before he twirled us around to face our pursuer.  
  
The thief who’d been sitting at the wall, the muscle who’d been positioned to take out the guards if things went bad, and the one who, I gathered, had told the guards I was staying in the Grey Quarter and had offered to take me himself. He stood now, burlap cape drawn back to reveal his guild armor, cowl pulled away to show his face and hair the color of rich, thick honey mead. Two lines of red paint were drawn beneath each eye, an ode to his bloody past.  
  
“Thrynn,” I whispered on an inward breath.  
  
But Cicero was in no mood to meet my former lover, member of the guild that had violently chased me from Riften. An instant after locking eyes with the former bandit, Cicero was leaping onto a nearby stack of crates—oh, we were close to the cornerclub, this was where I’d stopped to empty my stomach!—and with a quick toss to position me over his shoulder, he grabbed a windowsill and pulled us up into the open hole in the building, kicking the stack of crates down as he went so that Thrynn could not follow. I yelped in confusion, but he didn’t pause or offer any assuring words, he just kept right on moving across the ledge, jumping from that ledge and onto an awning over another building. I could barely keep up with where he was going, but dangling over his back, I watched as Thrynn helplessly ran down along the avenue below, looking for a spot to intercept us. A hop-step more and the road was no longer even in sight. We were at the very top of the building, running across the roof. From here, I could faintly see where, through the veil of fluffy falling snow, the other thieves had been stationed in their different vantage points. Unless the infiltration team had made incredibly short work of their burglary, they would all still be in place, probably wondering where their ground-bound muscle had gone running off to.  
  
Cicero moved deftly as always, even though he carried me in a less-than-comfortable bundle over his shoulder. Without any apparent inconvenience from my weight or presence, he navigated the shambling rooftops, leaping over holes in the frameworks and patched ceilings with hardly a sound. My dear jester must have made a truly deadly assassin—his marks would never have heard him coming, assuming he wasn’t singing while on the job.  
  
We reached the gabled roof of the cornerclub, and without so much as a word of warning (save, perhaps, an ominous chuckle to himself), Cicero started to the edge of the roof, ready to flip us both over the side and into the window directly below us. He was stopped short by what he saw right beneath us, however, and paused to take me off of his shoulder and deposit me on the sloping roof.  
  
A hand appeared from over the edge, then another, then all of Thrynn in one swift pull-up. I shouldn’t have been surprised; back in Riften, he’d scaled Mistveil Keep just to get some moss for me. With all the banners and flags around the tavern, not to mention roughly-cut flagstones and deeply eroded mortar, he would have ample opportunity to climb up.  
  
“Hoo-hoo-hoo! Cicero told you, Cicero  _warned_  you not to follow! And follow you did, oh, yes, oh, yes, you did!” the clown tittered, palming the dagger at his hip in anticipation.  
  
“Nuhh,” I moaned, pushing myself uneasily onto my feet. Standing was hard enough, but standing on the steep slope was a bit more than I could confidently handle at the moment. But I fought through my disorientation, steeling myself to get right in the middle of the men should it come to blows. I wasn’t about to let either get hurt.  
  
Thrynn cracked his knuckles, his upper lip pulled into a grimace. “I’m not here to pick a fight with you but if that’s what you really want, you got it.”  
  
Damn it, no, stop! I wanted so badly to say. It came out too slurred to mean anything when I tried to articulate the sentiment, so I made do with stumbling forward and waving my arms emphatically.  
  
His hard brown eyes watched me shuffle through the snow towards him, and his body stiffened, clearly not knowing how to react. Considering the whole guild thought I was a traitor, he probably had come to finish me off in the name of whatever honor existed among thieves. Was he considering striking me down? He opened his mouth to speak, but I would never know what it was he intended to say.  
  
Because before he could say anything, my foot slipped out from underneath me. Cicero squawked behind me, but Thrynn’s hands shot out like snakes, catching me by my flailing wrists before I could topple down the roof. “Damn it, Brina,  _stop falling_!” he chastised.  
  
If only it were so easy, I wanted to shout at him. Instead, I said something about being easy, and hiccupped the rest of the broken sentence.  
  
I hadn’t forgotten how firm his body felt beneath the tough guild armor, or the warm smell of the Ragged Flagon that clung to his leathers, or the steady rhythm his heart kept no matter how strenuous the situation. Instantly, we were transported back to Riften, and it was just another night spent getting wasted in the Flagon, celebrating some heist or another. This was the inevitable part where I couldn’t walk anymore, so like he so often did, Thrynn was half-walking, half-dragging me to my bed in the cistern. We were back. I was home.  
  
“Unhand her!” It would have been a shriek if Cicero weren’t so angry that his words were choked in his throat.  
  
“I’m not going to hurt her,” Thrynn’s gravelly voice rumbled from his chest.  
  
“Cicero knows all about what you nasty, dirty thieves did to her in Riften. Unhand her this instant!”  
  
“Not me. And why should I trust you? I’ve seen men with eyes like yours before, worked with men like you for years. You’ve got her fooled, don’t you?”  
  
“Fooled? Oh, no, no, no! Brina knows me better than anyone! We’re two peas in a pod! Now give her back, before I have to start breaking promises.”  
  
It was a stalemate. Both were determined enough to stare the other down until the end of time. I had to be the one to put this to an end.  
  
No matter how warm, how welcoming his arms were, I had no place in them anymore. That home I imagined wasn’t mine anymore. They hated me, branded me a traitor, would have killed me if I’d given them the chance. It wasn’t my guild anymore, and to say I was an outcast was a grim understatement.  
  
I wanted to say something meaningful. All I could manage were tears and a shake of my head, and a low, “I wish, I wish.” I pulled away from Thrynn, and moved directly into Cicero’s waiting arms.  
  
That was the last thing I remember of being on the roof. I’m glad my memory went black before I saw the look on Thrynn’s face. I’d rather not know how he responded, or if he responded at all. I’d just pretend that he casually nodded and went on his way, water under the bridge.  
  
But honestly, I think if I really tried to remember, I would be haunted by a look of regret too similar to my own.   
  
  
When the world finally came back to me, it was with a massive pair of pale Nord arms carrying me up the stairs to the second floor of the cornerclub. At some point, we’d gotten down and Olev had met us. His arms were shaking, maybe from the cold, or maybe from barely-controlled rage. Muttering under his breath, he dropped me onto the bedroll tucked in the storage room.  
  
“No wonder you’re a favorite of Sanguine. He must be laughing his ass off in Oblivion right now,” Olev said.  
  
“Sanguine doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” I slurred into my pillow. Apparently I had regained my ability to speak somewhere along the way.  
  
“You sure? So you don’t remember the Breton man who you left with?”  
  
Ugh. Really? I moaned into the bedroll like a zombie. “No. I don’t.”  
  
“All the Dunmer downstairs said he even held the door open for you. You do remember that he is the reason why you weren’t drinking anymore, right? He wants your soul.”  
  
“I had a moment of weakness,” I murmured defensively. I felt like I’d had too many moments of weakness since coming to this stupid province, and I’d had it up to my eyes.  
  
“You had a couple hours of weakness, followed by a couple hours of Cicero and me scouring the streets for you,” Olev snapped. “You’re trying my fucking patience today, Brina! First the argument over your brother, then this? You’re a fucking child.”  
  
Getting mad wasn’t going to help, I wanted to say, but I knew saying that would only enrage him more. So I groaned into the bedroll again. “I’m sorry. I had a rough night, okay? Can you consider that justice?”  
  
My big Nord sat down on the floor beside me, and all the planks creaked painfully under his girth. An arm, thick with muscle and hard as stone, went under my shoulders. “The thief? Yeah, you were there when Cicero told me, remember? It’s shitty that you had to be confronted by him, but that doesn’t make this okay. You need to get yourself together, and for fuck’s sake, Brina, you have got to learn to control yourself. Sanguine is going to be whispering in your ear for the rest of your life, egging you on. He wants you. You can’t let him have you.”  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
“Yeah, well, I think we’ve overstayed our welcome in Windhelm, anyway. We’re leaving early.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“You don’t remember? I just told you, Cicero and I, in the market, we almost got arrested.”  
  
Had I been told about this? I stared at him blankly.  
  
“A stall was set on fire? There were vampires? Cicero accidentally stabbed a guard? How do you not remember this? I told you all about it literally three minutes ago. It’s why we were gone for so long!” He heaved a sigh and squeezed my shoulder. As I rolled into his side, settling my head on his shoulder, Olev grumbled, “Well, we’re leaving Windhelm. It’s no good for any of us.”


	23. In Which She Is Not Involved

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Brina was getting wasted in the New Gnisis Cornerclub, other people were doing other things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is not in Brina's point of view! (Gasp!) It jumps around from Haafingar, a few years before Brina came to Skyrim, then to Windhelm before Brina's drunk little escapade, and then one more little piece taking place afterward.

### Chapter Twenty Three

In the western region of Haafingar, the sun lingered at high noon. The warmth was welcome, except that the bitter wind stole what little heat the summer rays should have offered. Hours spent staking out the bandits had been fruitless, and now feeling a sting of a sunburn beginning to turn his nose red, Olev sighed and pushed himself from the ground. “They’re not going to just pop out of their hiding spot. They’ve been attacking carts and travelers, so let’s give them a reason to come out.”

“But if we just go in swinging, why wouldn’t they just stay in hiding?” Juhan asked, staying put behind their cover of rock. “That’s why no guards from Dragon Bridge have caught them. They may be bandits, but they’re not stupid enough to show themselves. They’ve got themselves a good spot on a good road, and they don’t intend to lose it.”

Olev’s heavy steel gauntlet came down on Juhan’s head before the boy could finish his sentence, ruffling his hair mercilessly much to his little brother’s aggravation. How Ma could let the frailest, weakest of her boys leave home to be a Stormcloak was beyond Olev, but the more quality time Olev spent with the inexperienced lad, the more he realized that he was smart enough to make his own decisions. What he had between his ears, however, did not make up for what he lacked in experience and skill. And big brother Olev came right home when he heard little Juhan was about to go off to Windhelm alone to join the cause. No, he had insisted, he would go with Juhan. And he would take Juhan on a roundabout path, putting as many opportunities to learn the art of battle between them and Windhelm as he could. He would not let his little brother go into the Stormcloaks a green soldier, unable to hold a sword right. He would not let Juhan be fodder to be chopped down by an Imperial in his first battle.

A tip from the locals of Dragon Bridge led them here, where a band of highwaymen were ambushing travelers. And, after hours of looking for some sign of them, there was still no indication where on the craggy hillside they hid.

“Yeah, I hear you,” Olev said. “They won’t show themselves for no reason, and they won’t attack if they think they don’t have the upper hand. But if they think I’m just a lone wanderer, they may try me. Be ready to come rushing out, alright?”

Behind him, Juhan blanched. “You’re going to let them ambush you?” he said, tearing off his iron helm emphatically to reveal youthful features, a round face, and light brown hair cut evenly by a patient female hand. “Hold on, stop! We need to talk about tactics! Where do you want me to come in from? Should I keep off the road and flank you?”

“Under what cover?” Olev laughed. “Are you going to run rock to rock? Just stay here. They should pop out close by, and when they do, run in.”

“Should I try and shoot them?”

“With your aim? No. Don’t shoot unless you’re pointing in the opposite direction of me. In fact, knowing you, you’d still hit me. Remind me to snap your bow in half when we’re done here, alright? Don’t know who trusted you with it in the first place.”

“Now is not the time to tease!” Juhan huffed. “Just, tell me what I should do. What should I expect?”

“Expect blood, and expect screaming, and expect for the moment to carry you,” Olev said sagely, making his way to the road. “I’ll take care of most of it. Just keep your limbs attached, and swing like you mean it. The rest comes with practice, but these are just common thugs. Alright? So don’t get so worked up.”

He was telling Juhan that all through the ensuing battle, and then when it was all over and they stood with mangled bodies at their feet. Tears streamed relentlessly from Juhan’s eyes as he pulled Olev back toward the town, the mercenary having been blinded by his own blood. There was blood everywhere, and Olev tried his best to explain in as relaxed a tone as he could manage, “Head wounds bleed a lot. This is nothing. Just a scratch, that’s all. It looks worse than it is.”

“You’re _covered_ in blood! I should have done more! I should have done _something_!”

“Just breathe, everything is fine. I’ve been chopped up much worse than this. This was your first time in battle with men. It’s a step you weren’t prepared for, killing fellow humans. It’s not a step many of us take easily, I understand. But when you’re fighting in the war, your heart will harden and it won’t be so—“

“I’m not joining the Stormcloaks,” Juhan choked, ashamed. “I can’t. I can’t kill evil highwaymen on the road, and I couldn’t kill anyone else. I can’t.” It was the best news Olev had heard in a long while, until it was followed up by, “I always knew I was meant to be a priest. To help people. And I thought I would serve as a priest to Talos, like Pa, but that’s not to be.”

Sucking blood off his lip, Olev scowled. Punishingly, he leaned just a bit more of his massive weight on Juhan’s shoulder. No great surprise that he would give himself to an Aedra, all things considered, and he venerated Julianos far more than most Nords. “Damn it, you know how I feel about that. But shit, you’re a smart kid, brighter than most. You’d do Julianos more good than Ulfric.”

“No, I wouldn’t devote myself to Julianos,” Juhan murmured. Shame still saturated his voice, and a bright red was filling his pallid complexion. “I’d been thinking… since before Pa died, even…”

“If you say Dibella, I’m leaving you in the wilderness.”

And leave him in the wilderness he very nearly did. An entire hour was spent waiting outside the inn of Dragon Bridge while the ladies out the town scrounged up remedies and a needle and thread to sew shut the gaping gash in his face just enough; that whole time was spent hollering at his brother so violently that by the time he was sat down to be stitched, Juhan’s face was covered in spatters of blood.

As he was held by the women and sewn, however, he was forced to remain quiet, finally giving Juhan the opportunity to speak. “I know. I know what happened to Pa, and I know how little we mean to the Divines. I don’t want to become a priest out of devotion to the gods. But if I become a priest, Ma won’t have to wait for word that I’ve been killed, and I won’t have to do any killing, either. I won’t be a burden anymore, since the temple will be my home and income, and I may even get enough to give to the family, maybe even more than I would make as a soldier. The temple of Dibella is a wealthy clergy, after all. And I’ll be happy. Imagine it, Olev, a simple, easy life full of beauty and love! I told myself I could be a soldier, but it’s the furthest thing from what I really want!”

In the end, Juhan did go back and become a priest, but a few weeks later, little Eha enlisted. Always a self-assured sort, she vehemently refused Olev’s escort to Windhelm, and all on her own she made it across the province. Within only a couple of months, Olev received a letter from home, proudly announcing that she was already making swift progress through the ranks.

Juhan remained a priest, as far as Olev knew, but Olev at least took solace in the fact that Juhan was already disillusioned to the powerlessness of the Divines, and was going into the profession with an honest, pragmatic disposition.

It seemed that the family was finally doing alright. Not that that would put a stop to Olev being the provider for the lot of them. He wouldn’t have it any other way, really. Perhaps having a family that depended on him was what had kept him from going into a blind rage when their father was taken. Maybe knowing that he had responsibilities back home was what stopped him from descending further from a mercenary to a common bandit. Or maybe he just needed to know that he was needed for his own sake, for his own happiness.

~~~

“Just stay right with me, alright? No wandering off,” Olev whispered under his breath to his eccentric companion, even as the jester veered across the stone street to look at Oblivion-knew-what. A few passing Nords gave him firm nods of greeting and approval. Ebony armor gleamed like icy obsidian through the thin layer of frost that settled over it, while the massive scar that dominated his face, from brow to nose to jaw in a single red gash, was testimony to his many battles and warrior spirit. In this city, he was welcomed and respected. His companions, less so.

Not that the bumbling pair of idiots he nearly considered siblings did much to command respect. It was endearing, but rather pathetic.

It never failed to dumbfound the mercenary how Cicero could fluctuate wildly between being a benign, cheerful fellow and a vicious psychopath, but thus far that destructive nature had never been turned his way. Right now, he was walking about with his eyes searching over every nook and cranny curiously, like a child overwhelmed by the new surroundings; a few hours ago, and he’d been chopping a dragon’s face, screaming with laughter. And there was Olev, who never expected to take on regular company outside of a merc band, accompanying the daft little man to the market. Every now and again, Cicero got oddly tense, and a palpable aura of ill-intent would manifest in the clown’s presence. It was best to keep him distracted, to avoid any violent outbursts.

Again, they’d yet to be troubled by such an occurrence yet, but Olev was of the mind that prevention was most important when dealing with such a dangerous sort. He could cleave the assassin in two, if he got completely out of hand, but an unexpected sense of camaraderie made him sorely adverse to the option. To Olev’s complete surprise, they’d become close friends. Together with their alchemically-inclined mage, they made a true team, something that the burly ex-soldier hadn’t anticipated by a long shot.

And now, here they were. Windhelm, the City of Snow, seat of Ulfric Stormcloak, out for a walk to keep Cicero from getting too bored, or tense, or whatever it was that gave the distinct impression he was about to start slashing anyone who got too close.

Past the dense clouds and swirling torrents of falling crystal, the sun was making a decline to the west, and the streets became steadily dimmer with each passing minute. A few months ago, Olev had set out from this city with a bounty in his hand and a mission on his mind. What mission did he have now? Money was no longer the driving force, since his family had received a generous sum from him recently. So what was his motivation? Why was he out here with these fools? What did he have to gain from their company?

All too often, Olev had to reach out and steer Cicero by the shoulders, keeping him out of the way and from bumping into any surly Nords as they wandered about the market. Cicero’s eyes were sharp as daggers, and one would expect him to be better focused to match them, but with every new stall came a million things to ponder at and inspect, and his those sharp eyes, curious as a Kahjiit’s, would not stop until he was certain there was nothing he could have missed, no expertly hidden gem among the junk.

It was with those constant grabs and pulls, however, that Olev was able to observe the progressive loosening of Cicero’s muscles as he slowly came out of whatever rage had set him off earlier.

“Now that you’re feeling better,” Olev ventured, unsure whether or not he really wanted to go down this path regardless of what his fraternal instincts instructed, “do you want to talk about it?” He held his breath for any number of horrible, disgusting things might pour forth from those ever-smiling lips.

Rather than say anything disturbing, Cicero’s grin widened manically, and his head swung in a slow shake, _no_. “Nothing to say! Not yet, anyways. But just you wait, brother, just you wait, oh, yes! There will be much talking later!”

“Why not now?” Olev prodded, calling back the low, smooth tone that he’d used on his youngest siblings when they spoke in the strange riddles children tell.

“Sometimes, disaster is the surest way to see progress,” Cicero said, waggling his index finger knowingly. “My family has always held that truth very highly, and Cicero has learned long ago that avoiding conflict will only prolong a problem.”

“I don’t follow.”

“If Cicero told you, you would go and fix the problem! But it wouldn’t be fixed, oh, ho, ho, no, not this one. This one takes disaster. Cicero just needed to remember that, that’s all. Feeling much better now!” He did a little dance to prove it.

Ugh, he hated how cryptic Cicero could be, especially now that he’d confirmed that there was indeed a very serious problem at hand. “You’d tell me if we were in danger, wouldn’t you?”

Amber eyes blinked innocently at him—well, as innocently as they could, until one peered deep enough into the malicious depths. “Of course!”

As much as he knew that the creature beside him was a truly disturbed little man, Olev couldn’t help but believe him. Smacking a heavy, ebony-plated hand down on Cicero’s head, he rumpled the jester’s hat like he would have done to the hair of his siblings. “Alright. Well, while we’re out here, let’s pick up a few things. We need some heavy thread to sew the tent _where you sliced it open_ , and I need some leather to fix up the straps on my armor. We can get some dinner while we’re at it—Damn it, Cicero, what are you doing now?”

But the jester was already moving, cutting through the crowd like his dagger through flesh, moving directly for a trio of men dressed in ensembles of dark leather, quite unlike the usual style typical of scouts or mercenaries. While he had started after Cicero initially with the intention of grabbing the daft little man and pulling him back, Olev could quickly see what Cicero saw in the little gathering: eyes full of bloodlust, casting a dim yellow sheen like twin sunsets through fog, and tongues dragging across lips as they waited for the perfect moment to strike, for them to be adequately surrounded by unsuspecting victims so that fewer would have a chance to run. Cicero would have recognized the look as one he would often wear himself—and he would no doubt recognize the opportunity to shed some blood without having to get in trouble, since he could well enough say that the trio had started it.

Instead of reaching out to snag Cicero by the shirt, Olev was pulling his battleax off his back, readying his grip to chop some men down. Whatever they were up to, it didn’t take much to know it was no good.

Cicero had almost reached them when their leader gave a smirk and a nod, the signal to its thralls to begin the assault on the market. Without a word between them, without a question, the thralls drew blades and swung into the innocent crowd. Their leader readied a compact ball of magicka between his palms and released it as a gout of flame that bathed the marketplace in an orange glow and set the nearest stall alight.

The last bit of distance was closed in a heartbeat, with Cicero laughing jovially and intercepting one thrall’s sword with his dagger. Holding the enemy’s blade in place by his crossguard, Cicero pushed upward to throw the thrall’s arm up and away, and with his torso now completely vulnerable, Cicero delivered a hard kick directly to his exposed ribs, cracking bone and stealing breath. With the thrall stunned and recovering, the clown flipped his grip on his dagger and stabbed. And stabbed. And stabbed. And stabbed. And stabbed.

“There’s more than one!” hollered at his enthralled companion, readying his axe for a downward swing. Gravity did all the work for him, really, especially since the thrall had relatively little armor to deal with. It was a quick one, however, and rolled swiftly to the side, and Olev’s axe instead came down hard on the flagstones, shattering the stone, and sending painful waves up his arms as he tried to pull himself back to rights. Too late, he straightened his back to feel a sword smack hard against his armor. The force of the blow stung, but the blade had no chance of breaking through the tough ebony shell he wore, and certainly not as long as the thrall was swinging wildly without aiming for the seams of his armor. It would be no challenge, as long as he managed to land a single hit with his heavy axe.

Or, at least, it wouldn’t have been a challenge if their leader had been distracted. The first wave of guards to reach the scene fell in bloody heaps, barely able to even engage the vampire for longer than a second before its infernal magics mowed them down. Now, as citizen darted away screaming, scrambling into the nearest buildings and ducking behind market stalls, the reinforcements of the guard clanging over from the Valunstrad District were too far away to divert the vampire’s full attention.

Olev could well enough take the bangs on his armor from the thrall, but he had no defense against the magical pull of vitality directly from his body and into the vampiric aggressor. He had to flinch away from the source of the indescribable magical pain that tore through him, to get his bearings before facing the unfamiliar foe. It took an excruciating moment to center himself and regain his wits before he announced his return to the battle with a roar of rage and a swinging axe that took the thrall’s head clean off its shoulders. And Olev kept right on swinging, trying to get to the vampire.

It’s face pale as a corpse, its eyes gleaming a ghastly yellow hue, the vampire walked backward, trying to avoid Olev’s infuriated swings while still holding its arms out to continue stealing away his strength. Behind it came three guards, rushing through with swords drawn, hollering that anyone still in the market should flee. As Olev and the guards converged on the vampire, Cicero too abandoned his bloody pulp of an opponent to fly for the vampire, dagger raised.

Everyone swung.

His axe tore through some of its armor, not killing it, but certainly leaving it wounded, and as the arc continued round, he feared that he might clip a guard. He pulled against the inertia of the swing to try and avoid hitting one of the soldiers, when he saw his caution was of little need: Cicero stabbed straight through the vampire’s armor, and in his zealous bloodlust, kept right on stabbing him. One of the guard’s swords knocked the vampire to one side, however, and Olev watched in horror as Cicero’s stabbing motion continued right on course as the space the vampire had once filled became occupied by a guard.

Directly in the chest. And Cicero still did not stop. It was all Olev could do to throw his axe to the ground, allowing the guards to finish the vampire off, and lift Cicero off the ground, throwing him over the wreckage of one of the market stalls and into a bunch of boxes.

“That was the last of them!” Olev shouted, indicating the splattered remains of two thralls, a vampire, and the mess of broken boxes. “All dead! Even the one in the boxes!”

“By the Gods! He killed Kaj!” one guard spat, bending down to inspect his fallen friend.

“It’s a good thing that, from a vampire attack, only a single man had to die,” Olev said. “Kaj has served Ulfric and his city well. May he feast in Sovngard.”

It wasn’t until the guards had taken their dead comrade away that Olev pulled Cicero out of the trash, apologizing for the manhandling. “You did well, though, playing dead! They didn’t even think to look for you! Damn it, if you’d been caught, we don’t have the money to pay off your fine!”

The jester was pulling splinters out of his jacket as he whined, “You didn’t have to be so rough!”

“I had to make it look like you were one of them! What other excuse would I give for you stabbing a guard ten times? Those vampires may have caused a bit of havoc, but you were the only one who killed anybody!”

“They would have killed the whole city,” Cicero sniffed. “Cicero is a hero. They should sing a song about him one of these days!”

“You were just happy that you got a good reason to kill someone. Was killing a dragon this morning not good enough for you?”

Straightening his back proudly, Cicero said, “Not Cicero’s fault the guard got in the way of the real target! It was an accident, and Cicero will not apologize for it!”

“I’ll bet if I got in the way, you wouldn’t have kept on stabbing,” the giant of a Nord pointed out, idly thumbing a scratch in his armor as they ambled through the snow back to the Grey Quarter.

“Of course not! But the guard was different. Stupid guard was _asking_ for it! He was—“ The words were cut short by a heavy hand landing on the jester’s head and rumpling his hat like the hair of a little child.

“Say no more, Cicero. I’ll be sure not to ask to get stabbed any time soon.”

What did he have to gain by putting up with two little basket cases? What motivation did he have? A sense of purpose, a reason to fight. What other reason had Olev ever asked for?

~~~ 

The only sense of relief he’d felt that night was in finding that his guildmates had actually bothered to wait for him at the designated meeting spot in the alley beside Hjerim. Thrynn had expected to find the thieves still celebrating a successful heist, but by the grim expressions on the assemblage, he could only assume that the job had been botched after he left the scene.

The crunch of snow announced his arrival before he got the chance to speak. All at once, every eye was turned on him, expressions reflecting various shades of curiosity, eagerness, and concern.

“Sorry I wasn’t there to help you guys get out, but it looks like you’re unscathed,” he remarked gruffly, his voice maybe a bit rougher, a tinge thicker than usual. “Better luck next time. Did you at least find a better entry point for the next attempt?”

Vex shook her head. Toward the back of the group, leaning up against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest, the whole team seemed to radiate from around her. Grown men had a habit of shrinking in her shadow, due in no small part to the aura of strength and authority that she wielded with a perfected sneer. “No need. We got the mark within minutes. Plan went off without a hitch. Until we got out and thought you’d been caught, since you should have been the first one we saw on exit. Where the fuck did you go? Kynvind said you bolted when you saw some drunkard getting carried off by a guard!”

“It wasn’t just any drunkard,” Thrynn started, immediately biting back anything further he could have added. Why get into it at all? What good could it do them? He should have just apologized to the woman and been done with it.

“Wasn’t just any--? Then, by all means, tell me what was so important that you chose to ditch your position in the middle of one of our biggest jobs in years! We’ve just reclaimed Windhelm as our turf, and you go wandering off, jeopardizing what we’ve worked for!”

Damn, but Vex was a harsh boss. Even the thieves sitting around the alley were flinching uncomfortably at her rising voice, as though they were the object of her ire. Thrynn kept himself from grimacing and remained standing tall and, by all appearances, confident, but after what he’d just walked away from, keeping his composure was proving a more difficult task by the second.

“She distracted the guards when your pick broke,” Thrynn explained, gravel in his throat. “If it weren’t for her, the whole thing would have been busted before you even got in. I just—forget it. Just forget it alright? I never got distracted on a job before, and it won’t happen again. Okay, Vex?”

Now she was intrigued. She pulled herself up from the wall and took a step toward the former bandit, her voice dropping to a low, threatening whisper. “I’m not going to forget it, Thrynn. If you’re getting at what I think you are…” She let her sentence die on her lips leadingly, and lifted a slender silver brow with expectation.

“Brina. She was the one who covered for your broken pick and distracted the guards. They were talking about throwing her in the dungeon, but I told the guards she was staying in the Grey Quarter. Figured one of her Dunmer friends would take care of her, or, if no one brought her in, I would lift her when the guard left her.”

“I’m sorry,” Kynvind, a new recruit born and raised in the Windhelm chill, piped in, “you don’t ‘lift’ women. Stealing is a bit different when it’s a person. It’s called kidnapping. And I was under the impression that that wasn’t our business.”

“It would be a bit different in her case,” Rune explained in a whispered aside. “She’s a former member of the guild. Left on… pretty unfriendly terms.”

“I know, I heard the stories. That makes kidnapping her make even less sense,” Kynvind argued.

Vex was waving off the banter with an impatient hand as she hissed, “So let me get this straight: you left your position to follow a guard taking Brina down to the Grey Quarter. You were going to wait for the guard to toss her on a stoop, and then you were going to carry her back to Riften with us like a piece of loot?” Over Kynvind’s exasperated scoff, she continued, “Well, where is she?”

Thrynn’s face shifted into just a shadow of a smirk. She was cold, shrewd woman, but she liked Brina, and she knew that Brina’s talents were valuable to the guild. If Thrynn had joined them in the alley with Brina draped unconscious over his shoulder, Vex would've spent the whole trip to Riften hiding her excitement. “A traveling companion of hers found the guard and took her. He was a dangerous one. I don’t trust Brina with him, but I didn’t want to give him a reason to lose his head and do something to hurt her, so I backed off. For now.”

“Wait, so you didn’t do anything?” Rune asked incredulously. “That doesn’t seem like you. Was he really that scary?”

“It’s not that I didn’t do anything. I followed them to the end of the Grey Quarter and onto the roof.”

The thieves glanced between one another, until Vex broke the silence with an impatient, “Did you tell her that we know she wasn’t a traitor?”

“Did you tell her that Karliah had never even heard of her?” Rune added.

“Did you tell her that her brother didn’t even know she was in Skyrim?” Garthar asked.

“He still doesn’t know,” Ravyn said with a roll of his eyes. “Whenever anyone mentioned her, he’d just start talking over them, or get distracted by something somewhere else. I don’t think he’s heard a word.”

Garthar’s brows knit at the thought. “His eyes just sort of glaze over if anyone’s telling a story about her. Do you think he even knows he _has_ a sister?”

“Yeah, he knows,” Vipir chuckled. “I asked him if he had any family once, just to see if he’d acknowledge her. He said his whole family lived in Cyrodiil. I asked if his sister was attractive, and he told me he’d cut off my hand if I ever said a disrespectful word about her again.”

“So will I,” Thrynn growled, cracking his knuckles menacingly just by clenching his fists in turn.

“Oh, don’t get protective,” Vipir said, waving it off. “I was just saying it to see if I could get a reaction! I wouldn’t touch her even if you didn’t have dibs.”

“You can’t call dibs on a person.” Kynvind was rolling her eyes, smacking Rune in the arm. “You guys get that she’s a person, right? You can’t steal _or_ call dibs on women.”

“The point is, what did you say to her? What did she say?” Vex said.

Thrynn drew his tongue over his lips, breath caught in his throat for a long moment while the night’s events replayed in his mind. “I didn’t say any of it. I didn’t get the chance to. I was so pissed that she was with a guy who would throw her over his shoulder and climb on a roof to get away from me, and threaten to skin me if I got close—“

“Oh, so Brina _does_ have a type,” Vipir chimed. “Now it makes sense why she was with you. She likes the violent, scary sort. Makes sense, with her brother.”

“Focus,” Vex snapped. “So you didn’t say anything to her? You didn’t tell her that the guild wants her back?”

Sitting at the bottom of the wall, one of the newer recruits perked up. Hrolmir was following the trail blazed by Brina as a mage in the team, using spells to help control the situation and assist the thieves doing the heavy lifting. “Does the guild really need her? I can do her job just fine. Besides, the way I heard it, she was never _really_ part of the guild to begin with. Sort of an honorary deal, right?”

Hrolmir was not paid any heed; in fact, no one even looked at him, or gave any indication that he’d spoken at all.

Abashed by Vex’s questions, Thrynn made a noise in the back of his throat akin to a grunt, almost something like an apologetic sound. “I didn’t get the chance to say anything. I was distracted.”

“You mean emotional,” Vex accused. “Not much we can do about it now. But we’ll keep an eye on her and, should the opportunity arise again—“

“Wait,” Vipir interrupted, earning himself a scathing glare from Vex, “opportunity? Keep an eye on her? What happened to lifting her?”

“’What happened to’--?! Kidnapping the poor girl isn’t seriously up for discussion!” Kynvind blanched.

“What do you know about the man she’s with?” Vex asked.

Beside her, Kynvind’s jaw dropped. “You’re really serious about this? Kidnapping a member of the guild? Kidnapping some poor, helpless girl?”

If Thrynn heard a word the youngest member of the guild was saying, he didn’t appear the least bit torn up over the moral dilemma at hand. “An Imperial, but a killer. His eyes were remorseless, and the twitch of his muscles was animal, all instinct and rage. He spoke in rhymes, and dressed in a jester’s clothes. I’m sure he was insane.”

“Wait, a jester?” Garthar said. “I think I know who you’re talking about. I saw him in the market earlier in the night while I was getting a couple last minute supplies for the heist.” A bottle of mead to keep him warm while sitting as a lookout on the roof. It was a legitimate business expense! “And Brina’s not alone with him. When I saw him earlier, he was with another man. Huge Nord with a big scar covering most of his face. He had ebony armor, and an axe that was not made with cutting wood in mind. I wouldn’t want to cross either of them.”

“And stealing Brina—“

“ _Kidnapping_ ,” Kynvind cut in.

“—wouldn’t go over well with them,” Rune finished.

“It wouldn’t go over well with her brother, either,” Vipir added. “Imagine his face if we brought her home in a bag!”

The majority of the gathering chuckled at that, all-too-easily imagining the bedlam that would no doubt break out should their abrasive guildmate find out that the only person he seemed to care about had been victimized in any way. Kynvind in particular knew just how passionately the nearly-Nightingale loved his sister. Having heard stories about Brina and her short time in the guild, Kyn inquired about her one of her first nights in the Flagon. Never had she heard anyone fawn over a person so, and certainly never someone reminiscing about a sibling! While she very much admired the extent of his familial love, Kyn would always remember it as one of the stranger conversations of her life: a violent egomaniac rambling on for nearly two hours about what a perfect angel his adorable little baby sister was.

“We’ll figure it out later,” Vex said, waving it off like a troublesome fly. “But we don’t have time to be dawdling around, worrying about shit like this. We’ve got what we came for. Thrynn, don’t beat yourself up. Playing diplomat is Bryn’s job for a reason, and if he wants to track her down, he will. No _kidnapping_ ,” she stressed the word to humor Kyn, “necessary.”

With that, Vex drew the mask of her Nightingale cowl over her face and waved her arm in a short, aggravated flick. “Let’s get out of here. Delvin’s probably picking through my underthings as we speak.”


	24. In Which She Talks With The Scholar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brina has come a long way since coming to Skyrim. She's learned a lot, and her blind adoration for her brother has been tempered by a fair dose of reality. But that doesn't mean she's given up--until now. In light of a terrifying new realization, everything Brina thought she wanted will be drastically changed. She's come this far, but now things go downhill in a way she never would have expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to warn you. I'm going to seriously warn you. Things get weird. And I apologize. You'll know the conversation I'm talking about when you see it. So, here's the deal with it: this is some esoteric lore going on. It is briefly and vaguely touched on in the games, and something I don't expect anyone to know or understand unless you've gone out of your way to research this stuff. And that's totally fine, because Brina doesn't know what it all means, either, so if you don't know what he's rambling on about, you're coming at it from the same perspective as Brina.
> 
> That said, I would love input and comments. I was worried about posting this chapter, because it does feel pretty convoluted, but I wasn't sure how to succinctly go into this heavy lore without making it even more complicated than it needs to be. I hope it makes enough sense as it is.

### Chapter Twenty Four

“The snow is so bright!” I whined all the way to the Stone District. I leaned heavily on Olev, shielding my eyes from the constant glare of sunlight streaming through the white overcast and reflecting off the snow and ice.  
  
On my other side, Cicero wore Missus Loreius’s cloak, the hood drawn low over his face. Every glance of the fluttering tundra cotton cape made my stomach clench painfully at the horrid irony that he should be the one wearing it, but Olev insisted that he be concealed until we got out of any areas with heavy populations of guards on duty. Apparently, Cicero was supposed to be dead. They hadn’t explained much, and with my throbbing headache, I was hardly listening anyway.  
  
We teetered through the streets, pausing for me when I very nearly lost my breakfast of bread and water, and made it to the stables at our slow pace by midday.  
  
“So, where are we going?” I asked. Ambarys hadn’t taken any of our money since we’d only stayed a single night. For enabling my utter destruction of my sobriety, he had insisted that our only night would be free. That meant we had enough money to hire a carriage to just about anywhere in the province.  
  
“You can’t go to Riften, Cicero can’t be in Dawnstar or anywhere near Falkreath, and we can’t go too far west where the Thalmor can get you,” Olev grumbled. “I would sooner eat troll fat than spend any amount of time in Winterhold; no work there, and most the city is in the sea anyway.”  
  
“Isn’t that where the college is? For mages?” I asked, only slightly interested.  
  
Olev nodded. “It is, but I don’t suppose you wanted to join?”  
  
“No… I guess I was just curious about it. I’m much more interested in alchemy than anything else, and I doubt the college has much to offer me on that end. I really just want to go somewhere warmer. Where the seasons actually matter, maybe.”  
  
Really, I wanted to go to Riften. After seeing Thrynn, just for a moment, I wanted to go back and tell them the truth, to beg Mercer to reconsider and defend myself like I’d been too afraid to do at the time. Brynjolf would see I was being honest, of that I was sure. He was all about reading people, and he knew better than anyone what an open book I was. If I just went back and really, really begged, would they listen? Would Thrynn ever be able to trust me again?  
  
What did he think I meant when I cried to him last night? All I said was “I wish,” and he could have interpreted that any number of ways.  
  
Did he follow me to finish me off? Or did he follow because he missed me, too?  
  
“Let’s go to Whiterun, then,” Olev said. “We don’t care to go searching for your brother anymore, right? And you didn’t want to stay there before because you thought it would distract from becoming a priest, and that’s not an issue anymore. It’s under Stormcloak control, so no Thalmor. And Cicero doesn’t have any of his family there to try and kill us.”  
  
The last time I’d been in Whiterun, it was many weeks ago, and had been remarkably healing following my falling out with the Thieves Guild. What if I just went back? What if I really did give up on finding Brother, became Arcadia’s apprentice again, gave in to Arvid’s propositions, and accepted the life I’d been continuously denying myself? My home in Kvatch was gone, and I had my new family here with me, Cicero and Olev. Would they stay with me? There was plenty of work to be had with the Companions, which would support the family back in Markarth, and Olev would fit right in with them. Cicero would be as at home there as anywhere, probably. It seemed more important to him not to be alone, really. For at least a little while, it would be nice not to be on the move. And, while no longer seeking Brother out, it was more likely that he would come through and find me in a central city.  
  
“Alright. Whiterun,” I agreed, already feeling a smile cross my pasty skin. “I wonder if my room at the Huntsman is still being rented out. The bed is huge. It can fit three people, easy.” I knew from experience, though the memory, my first meeting with Sanguine, made me shudder.  
  
“Off we go!” Cicero chirped. He grabbed my hand and dragged me to the nearest carriage for hire, skipping like an excited child while Olev clanged loudly behind us in his full ebony plate.  
  
Despite the hangover, the glaring brightness of day, or the rattling of the carriage, I’ve never slept sounder than I did with my head on Cicero’s willing shoulder and my legs stretched across the cart for my feet to rest on Olev’s less-willing knees. Somewhere along the way, Missus Loreius’s cloak ended up over top of me to shield me from the sun, and was only removed when we stopped to let the horses rest just before nightfall. Those woods were too dangerous to make camp in overnight, so we would be continuing the journey without another pause until morning at least, and arrive in Whiterun by evening.  
  
A small fire was made in our temporary camp. We watched in amazement as Cicero snuck up on a rabbit, the poor creature completely unaware, and stabbed it through its little head before it even knew he was there. I sniffled for the thing’s sudden passing even as Olev praised our little assassin and got straight to skinning it, leaving me to cook our unfortunate meal.  
  
Olev took his first bite, winced, and continued on silently. Shocked, I looked to Cicero, and saw that he had the exact same reaction. Both my boys stared intently at the fire, neither one daring to so much as glance at me.  
  
“Is something wrong?” I asked, horrified. My rabbit tasted just fine!  
  
Olev shook his head, lips pursed, but leave it to Cicero to hold nothing back: “Little sister is a horrible cook. Absolutely terrible. Blech.”  
  
My jaw dropped. “What are you talking about? It’s cooked just right, crispy, juicy on the inside! This may be the best I’ve ever done! And I cook for us all the time!”  
  
“It’s cooked well, yeah,” Olev said, flinching away in anticipation of my reaction. “But what did you cook it with?”  
  
“Frost mirriam! It’s a common herb here in Skyrim!”  
  
Olev leveled a stare my way. “Just frost mirriam? Really? Nothing else?”  
  
“Well, I added some thistle. With the frost mirriam, it’ll help us stave off the cold for the rest of the trip, so—“  
  
Cicero sang a little sigh and Olev rolled his eyes, saying, “You put  _thistle_  on a rabbit.”  
  
“Just a little bit, just to—“  
  
“It’s dinner, not a medicine! Everything you cook, you have to throw in some alchemical nonsense! We still eat it. We always do. But damn it, just once, I would  _love_  if you could just make a proper meal without trying to make a potion out of it!”  
  
“Fine, give me your shares. I’ll eat all of it. And you can sit in the carriage, hungry and cold, wishing you’d had some of my delicious medicinal rabbit, while I’m happy and warm and full—“  
  
They didn’t have any other complaints, they just grimaced through what was left of their food, shuddering every once in a while.  
  
Oh, well. We were all cozy and comfortable when we set back out to roll our way through the night. And on either side of me, my boys slept soundly while I stared up at the green auroras, wondering how Thrynn was doing until at some point, I must have drifted off.  
  
  
_Thirty-First of Second Seed_  
_Dear Big Brother,_  
  
_We’re almost to Whiterun. The sun is shining! I haven’t seen sunshine in weeks! And there are flowers everywhere, and it actually feels like springtime!_  
  
_My boys don’t mind not being in the midst of mayhem or adventure, at least for the time being. I’ve waited for life to become simple and peaceful again for a long, long time. I hope this is where we meet again. I want to see you again, and I want you to see me happy. Not with bruises around my neck, not with a Daedra leading me to my destruction, not with a broken heart or a torn conscience. I want this to be how we meet again. I think you’d be proud of me like this._  
  
Of course. I should have expected that the moment I was seen coming into the city by the guards, their prodigal captain-in-training would be alerted all the way up at Dragonsreach. How did he get down to the Plains District so fast?! Were the guards using smoke signals?!  
  
Before I was even at Arcadia’s, there he was, Arvid, dressed in Whiterun’s yellow with a Stormcloak blue sash going over the top of it. His Imperial soldier haircut was completely grown out into a rugged mane, and his face was covered in a thick golden beard through which his straight white teeth showed off a dashing smile. The beard mostly covered the scar he’d won in the battle for Whiterun, but I could still see the faint white line peeking out through the scruff, reminding me always of his betrayal to the Empire.  
  
“I hope I’m not too late to bid you a proper welcome! I ran down as fast as I could!” Gods, but he still had that sweet, earnest ring in his voice, like a puppy just wanting to be praised. Against my better judgment, I remained still as he threw his arms around me and held me in a hug that lingered just a moment too long. No longer embarrassed by my refusal to marry him, he was clearly right back in the mindset of winning me over. “Talos be praised, I worried for you. I knew you would be fine, of course, you’re a tough girl, but I wished you’d just stayed here with me. I see no priest robes, no amulet. Have you changed your mind yet?”  
  
He just had to look at me with those big, kind blue eyes. My sweet, stupid Arvid.  
  
Rather than break his heart again, or anything nearly as cruel, I offered him pat on the shoulder and a strained smile.  
  
“Have you changed your mind about siding with the rebels?” I asked.  
  
His entourage of guards stiffened at the question, but bless him, Arvid straightened with stubborn pride. “Not at all, and I never will! There’s a Thalmor agent in the dungeon right now, and if we were still under the Empire’s thumb, he’d be sitting having supper with the jarl instead, tearing down the statue of Talos and carting you off to Gods-know-where!”  
  
For some unknowable reason, the air got remarkably cold at the mention of the agent. I suppressed a shiver as I asked, “That seems like an over-reaction.”  
  
“It’s not. Even when we were locking him in, he kept asking questions. About you and your brother. The Empire is controlled by the Thalmor, and the Thalmor are after you. They’re after everything we all hold dear, and I’ll be damned if I let them take my Gods or my love.”  
  
An approving chatter rippled through the marketplace. Damn it. They all just adored him, didn’t they? The face, voice, and real potential of a leader, he was indeed blessed with a magnetic air. For a moment, I had to remind myself that I definitely  _did not_  agree with him.  
  
I choked down any impulses I had, any other words that threatened to spill out in response to his disarming persuasion. I had to focus. “Kept asking questions?” I asked. “Don’t tell me… he’s old, with really long, crazy hair? A little too much fire behind his eyes, like he was touched by Sheogorath?”  
  
“Told us to send you up to him when you got here, like he knew you would come,” Arvid answered, his voice getting lower. I had to take a step closer to him just to hear, which must have been his intention, because at my proximity, he brought an armored hand to my cheek. “Maybe someone tipped him off before he got here. He’s only been here three days, so it can’t be a coincidence that you’d arrive so soon. Don’t tell me—I know you’re an Imperial, but please tell me you’re not working with them?”  
  
“No! That one, he’s insane! I’ve met him, and it was terrifying!” I swallowed thickly. “But… what else has he said? About my brother? They haven’t gotten him, have they?”  
  
Arvid was shaking his head, but before he said more, he began to tug me through the crowd, up toward the Wind District. “We should talk in private, Brina. I have a room in Dragonsreach. No one will bother us.”  
  
I wish I knew what kind of smoke signals the guards used to alert him from the castle. I sorely would have liked a way to tell Olev and Cicero to rescue me should anything go awry.  
  
The whole walk up to the castle, I felt the eyes of guards, some I recognized and others I did not. Their eyes followed us through the holes in their helms, casting meaningful glances to the lieutenant who led me. More than once, I caught them nodding to Arvid with something more than a greeting.  
  
Dragonsreach sat upon a hill and overlooked the entire city. By the time we reached it, the sun had set completely, but the view stunned me none the less. Down below, I could see every building in town, illuminated by braziers and torches from the outside, candles from the inside. Plumes of smoke like ghostly hands reaching into the sky poured from every chimney, with especially large fires burning inside of Jorrvaskr and the Bannered Mare. Up above, the auroras shone brilliantly in red and green, waving like banners in the wind. Arvid let me sigh and admire the scenery for a while before taking my hand and leading me into the glorious castle itself.  
  
I’d never been up to the Cloud District before, and I certainly had never been inside of Dragonsreach. It was a huge building in the old Nordic style, and yet despite its massive size, it was kept warm. Braziers burned all over, adding to the heat the radiated from the wide hearth set in the middle of the main hall. My eyes were drawn upward to the high ceilings and towering pillars before I followed Arvid timidly to see the wide hall up close. Supper was at an end, and many of the seats at the two long tables on either side of the hearth had been vacated, with servants clearing those spots. A few still remained seated, some eating and others still locked in rapt conversations over empty plates. Among them, I recognized the new jarl, who I’d seen once before but never been introduced to. Not that I cared for that to change. I had no business with jarls, and certainly not those that bent their knee to the Stormcloak regime.  
  
No one paid me any heed, as I was accompanied by the commander’s lieutenant, and indeed, no one even so much as glanced my way. Up the stairs to the back of the castle, passing by a table covered in a huge map and several extremely important-looking papers, Arvid led me around to the far end of the room. A heavy oak door that told me I was certainly not allowed inside marked his destination, and he held it open for me politely.  
  
“These quarters used to be used by the jarl’s family, but when the Gray-Manes took control, most of the family stayed in their home down in the Wind District. Sinmir and I were both given rooms two of the empty rooms, so that we’d be more available to the jarl,” he explained, directing me up the stairs and into the most private part of the castle.  
  
Until that night, I’d never even been inside of Dragonsreach, and here I was in the private quarters! How did they manage to make a place so massive so impeccably clean?  
  
Arvid pulled a key from his belt and started at his door when a voice came from behind us, startling me a foot into the air like a sabre cat eye dropped into boiling water. “I would scold you if I could believe my eyes. I didn’t think I’d ever see you bringing a lady to your room!” A tall Nord with a blond beard thick as a bear pelt stood over us, his stern demeanor broken by an unmistakable air of familiarity between himself and my formerly-favorite-guard. “But you know this area is off-limits to guests, and you don’t have the privilege to make exceptions. This sort of dalliance is what the Bannered Mare—“  
  
“Actually,” Arvid cut in, shocking me with his forwardness.  
  
If this was a superior, how did Arvid think he could get away with blatantly interrupting him? But rather than be reprimanded at the spot, the taller man just lifted his brows and crossed his arms, no doubt expecting a spectacular explanation to justify his oversight of the rules and his need to interject.  
  
“Sinmir, this is Brina,” he finished plainly. “We have a lot of catching up to do. As you well know.”  
  
And that was enough, apparently. The captain of the guard clapped his lieutenant on the shoulder, gave a firm nod, and walked away with the promise, “You two keep quiet and no one will bother you,” thrown over his shoulder.  
  
In response to my quizzical look, Arvid just nodded into the room and waved a hand inward invitingly. He waited until I was situated awkwardly on the edge of his narrow bed before saying slowly, “Just promise me that you’re not working with them. Not that I’d ever think that of you, but he said things, down in the dungeons, things that sounded like he knew you too well. I was so scared for you, Brina, but if I misunderstand where you fall in with the knife-eared bastards—“  
  
“I don’t work for the Thalmor!” I insisted, aghast, nearly falling off the bed in my haste to correct him. “They’ve been following me around, and the one they call the scholar said something to me about how I was the key to supremacy, and Et’Ada, and all kinds of crazy things! I don’t know what any of it meant, though!”  
  
He bit his lip, mulling over my words, and said, “He’s said a few things. Here and there, mostly to get our attention, I think, so we’d know to send you his way when you came. If they’ve been following you, I suppose it makes enough sense that he’d know you were on your way.” Leaning against the wall, his eyes dropped to the floor. “First of all, I should tell you… your brother has been… It’s strange. He’s the Dragonborn. The legendary Dovahkiin! But somehow, it’s as if he’s just… lost interest. Last he seemed to care about his destiny as Dragonborn, he was in Winterhold asking for advice from the College about finding an Elder Scroll that would help him defeat Alduin, and that was months ago. All sorts of strange rumors began to circulate shortly after, and one that batty old Thalmor in the dungeon mentioned with certainty: he went and got himself mixed up with Daedra, and came out of it with more than just an Elder Scrolls. But after getting that far, he’s just stopped. Nearly ready to do battle with the World-Eater, and he’s gone everywhere but the Throat of the World. To be sure, everyone talks about his grand adventures he’s been on. He’s been to every city, fought and killed more bandits than you or I could count, cleared barrow after barrow of draugr! He’s a hero in every sense of the word! But the world is on the verge of destruction. Alduin seeks to tear all of Nirn apart, and the only man who can stop him is…  _distracted_! It’s preposterous!”  
  
“So what does that have to do with the Thalmor?” I asked.  
  
“That ‘scholar’ said he knows why, but I’ll warn you, his explanation doesn’t make any better sense. It’s that he chooses to be distracted, that he’s  _avoiding_  the fight. Not because he can’t do it. The man is a born dragon slayer if ever one lived! But because, when he got that Elder Scroll, he had the voice of a Daedra in his ear, and he caught a glimpse so clear of that Scroll, and now he knows something he wasn’t ever supposed to know. Something so horrible, he’s decided that he’ll  _let_  Alduin eat the world.”  
  
Words escaped me. I sat there, stunned into silence, for far too long. The sound of a candle flickering on the bedside table could have fooled me for a wildfire, so quiet was the air between us.  
  
This was nothing like the brother I knew, eager for adventure, undaunted by any challenge, utterly unafraid! He craved heroism, he lived to be admired, to one day hear the masses sing of him like the Nerevarine or Cyrus or the Hero of Kvatch! And he had won it, the glory of being a hero as foretold in the scrolls of prophecy! Everything he’d ever wanted, and he was choosing not to fight?!  
  
“I don’t believe it,” I whispered. My whispering voice was a slight wheeze, partly courtesy of never fully recovering from when Dirge strangled me, and partly because it seemed my lungs had completely frozen in my chest.  
  
“I’ll take you down to talk to the elf yourself. He knows more, I’m sure, but he wasn’t going to tell anyone but you. He kept on saying that you were about to play your role, and the time was right for you to tie the threads of fate together. I didn’t want to let him anywhere near you, to hurt you with anything he could possibly say… but knowing you, you’d want to hear it no matter what. So, though I know well enough what deaf ears this falls on, I need to say it. I love you, Brina, and you don’t have to do a damn thing he says, you don’t have to listen to a word of his slander or lies, and you don’t need to fall into whatever trap he’s got going for you. I’ll keep him locked up until he’s a withered old corpse, and you never have to take a single step down into the dungeon, not to humor him and his wicked plots, not to give him the satisfaction! I will be the last person to blame you if you want to forget about him, and whatever he’s got up his sleeve, because I don’t trust him, and by the gods, I would rather go to war with the whole empire by myself than let him hurt you.”  
  
“You’re too sweet, Arvid. It can’t possibly be healthy. You should see Arcadia, she can probably mix something to help with that,” I said as apathetically as I could muster as I stood up and started for the door. “But I need to see what he has to say. Slander and lies or not, if he has information about what’s going on with my brother, or what the Thalmor have planned for me, I need to know. I’ll decide what to believe then.”  
  
He didn’t try to plead with me further. His silence beside me all the way down to the dungeon was palpable, his cerulean eyes hard and cold as I’d ever seen them, even when he’d come to kiss me through the bars of my cell right before running out to war.  
  
When we arrived in the dungeon, he wouldn’t move past the door, and I watched as his face clouded over from angst to bitter distrust. “Just… say the word. If he says anything wrong, just tell me to, and I’ll kill him,” he promised behind me.  
  
The cell was dark, the one at the end, freezing and lonely. When I peered through the bars, it looked nothing like what I had lived in following the Honningbrew debacle. The floor was a mess, and the Thalmor had been given no bed, and probably less food than a man should need.  
  
Despite how defeated I expected him to look, the scholar sat, legs crossed, with his chin in his hand, as though just pondering something casually. One might have thought that his disheveled hair and dress was due to his capture and time in prison, but I remembered from when he saved me in the Pale that he looked very much the same Sharp yellow eyes gazed at the wall as if looking deep into his own mind.  
  
“Arvid said you were waiting for me, scholar,” I said. Shoulders squared, chin set, I would at least play the part of a confident diplomat, even if I hadn’t the slightest clue what was happening in my or my brother’s lives.  
  
“Ah! Miss Brina Valus, glad you could make it!” he said cheerfully, the very edges of his voice frayed by a manic rasp. He stood and dusted his legs. “Yes, and I trust you’ve been filled in on your brother’s antics. It’s not his fault, really. He got to talking with the Daedra of forbidden knowledge, and forbidden knowledge he received. Naturally. It’s how I know what I know as well.”  
  
“My brother had better be okay!”  
  
“Darling girl, he’s fine. But I told you when we met before, the Towers are falling, and the Altmer grow ever closer to being reborn as Et’Ada, our godhood never stolen from us in the first place! And you are the key.”  
  
“Damn it, would you just explain yourself?!” I nearly shrieked. I heard Arvid pull his sword from his scabbard, but I waved him off. “I don’t want to have to get any more Daedra in my life just to figure out all the mysterious half-answers I keep hearing!”  
  
The scholar smiled at me, something between sympathetic and snake-like, made just a hint more menacing by the goatee around his lips. “You want all the answers? Then let’s give Sanguine a moment to come find us, because you’ll be spending the evening with him again after you hear all I have to say.”  
  
No words, just glowering. He got the hint to just go on.  
  
“The Towers, dear. All of them are coming apart, and once they’ve been disabled, their ability to hold Mundus together will fail. Whenever Alduin eats the world, time is reset back to Convention, when the Aedra tore the heart from Lorkhan. But that moment in time is too late for the Altmer, for we’ve already been tricked, our godhood already stolen. We must undo everything, and that means taking apart Mundus, as though it was never created in the first place. It will all be null at the hands of the Thalmor. Now, Alduin has been awakened far too early, and it’s no coincidence. Alduin is, after all, an aspect of Akatosh, God of Time, and Akatosh knows very well that the Thalmor plan to destroy time and draw the world back to before the starting point of history, before Convention itself. Alduin would eat the world and end this kalpa, bringing the world back to the beginning of the cycle at the moment of Convention. Prematurely drawing this timeline to a close, sure, but preventing complete destruction of time and Mundus and Nirn at the hands of the Thalmor.”  
  
He lifted one thin white eyebrow condescendingly. “Do you follow all this? I know, it’s dense information. Only the very highest of the Thalmor know any of this, mind you.”  
  
I nodded slowly.  _Was_  I getting all this? Probably not, it just sounded like even more insane drabble.  
  
“Your brother asked Hermaeus Mora some questions, and Hermaeus Mora answered. He asked  _why_  Alduin was trying to eat the world so early, and this is what he was told. So, our Dragonborn hero was faced with a dilemma: let Alduin reset the timeline to Convention, or defeat Alduin to give the Thalmor the time they need to see the destruction of Mundus to completion. Your brother decided that letting the world live on in a new timeline would be preferable to Mundus and all the life it’s ever seen being erased from existence.”  
  
Daedra-touched, the lot of them. This was madness if I’d ever heard it! Hermaeus Mora put this in their heads? More like Sheogorath in disguise! “And what do I have to do with any of this?” I whispered into the cold darkness of the dungeon cell.  
  
A pair of yellow eyes flashed at me predatorily. “You, Miss Valus, are what will seal the Thalmor’s victory, by ensuring that Alduin does not eat the world after all, buying us the time we need to dismantle the last of the towers, and obliterate Mundus from reality. You are going to convince him to defeat Alduin.”  
  
“What makes you think that?”  
  
He cracked a grin that could have made Cicero shudder.  
  
“Because for you, your brother would doom the world.”  
  
It was nonsense, and I kept telling myself that. It was just the insane ramblings of an evil Thalmor, it couldn’t mean anything! But the way he stared me down, the intensity in his eyes, the wicked smile he wore, it chilled me to the bone. And nothing on his face told me he spoke falsehoods, and no matter how many times my mind screamed not to take any of it to heart, a fear cold as death spread through me.  
  
He was insane, but he wasn’t lying, that much I could see in those burning yellow eyes. It was more than I could take. And the worst realization of them all dawned on me at that moment: I believed him.  
  
I could think of nothing more to say. So on shaking legs, hands trembling, I began to walk away. At my approach, Arvid opened the door and followed me.  
  
“What did he say? What’s going on? Brina? Are you alright? Brina?  _Brina_? Please, talk to me! Tell me what happened! Are you alright? Brina? Brina? Brina!”  
  
Bless him, he sounded so sincerely worried. But with one hand over my mouth, and my eyes stinging from terror and confusion, I couldn’t find it in me to tell him. And if I  _did_ , what would he say? Whose side would he been on? He hated the Thalmor, but did he hate them enough for him to allow time to be reset to the Dawn Era? Or would he insist that Skyrim’s legendary hero, the Dovahkiin, see his mission through, no matter the cost?  
  
How had the Thalmor gotten this far? I wondered. They were trying to destroy Mundus? For what, to be gods? My stomach rolled at the horrid possibilities. They would undo everything. Every life, every story, every moment, it would all be gone, never having happened to begin with. Who could come up with something so…  _crazy_?! It was  _crazy_!  
  
“Has there been any word of my brother?” I asked in a strangled voice.  
  
“Last we heard, he was in Solitude. They said he was headed south, so he may be coming here.”  
  
“When did you hear this?”  
  
“A few days ago, perhaps? He should be arriving a few days yet, if he is indeed coming for Whiterun. You can ask him about what’s going on yourself.”  
  
“No. If there’s a chance he’s coming here, I have to leave. And please, don’t tell him I was here, please. In fact, don’t tell him anything at all if you can help it.”  
  
“But—“ His puzzled frown deepened. “Alright. I’ll order all the guards to stay tight-lipped, have as few words with the Dragonborn as possible, and carry no conversations with him. But please, tell me where you’re going! I’ll send soldiers with you, to protect you from the Thalmor! I’ll talk to Sinmir, I’ll figure out how to go with you!”  
  
“Arvid.” We were halfway through the Wind District, right under the Gildergreen where we had danced together to celebrate killing the dragon. Outside the gates of the city, I healed a massive gouge in his side so that he could stand atop the dragon and stab it through its head. Once upon a time, I might’ve thought I’d marry him. “I’m going, and I don’t know where, and I don’t know if I’ll ever come back. Please don’t wait for me. You deserve better than that.”  
  
He stayed right beside me, seemingly undeterred by anything I was saying. His sky-colored eyes watched me intently, with the sort of attention and passion that reminded me painfully of Thrynn’s. “I’m just trying to help.”  
  
“For the wrong reasons.”  
  
“Because I love you. What better reason is there?”  
  
“Unrequitedly! I’m sorry, Arvid, but you’re too sweet, you’re too idealistic! You’re behind this romanticized rebel cause for freedom and gods! You’re adorable! You’re the sweetest man I’ve ever known! But damn it, Arvid, please, just give up on me! I’m leaving, and I’m not coming back.”  
  
The remainder of the walk down to the Drunken Huntsman was spent in yet another strained silence. If he were anyone else, he’d have gone his own way by now, but stupid, sweet, stubborn Arvid was still at my side the whole rest of the way. And when I slipped inside to collect my two boys, he stood outside there and waited.  
  
“We have to go! Now!” I said cried out as soon as the door closed. The few people inside the building all started at my outburst, and two men nearest the fire jumped immediately to their feet, weapons drawn.  
  
“Oooh, time to kill?” Cicero sang, diving to my side, dagger already swinging. So much for his blade being retired! Give the man an inch and he’ll take a mile.  
  
“Not yet! But I can’t be in Whiterun! I can’t be anywhere where my brother can find me! I need to hide! I need to—I need to go back to Cyrodiil!”


	25. The Zeymah's Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Markarth, the Listener takes a much-needed rest following the assassination of the century.

### Chapter Twenty Five

The Silver-Blood Inn wasn’t the nicest pub in Tamriel, but it would do for the night. Though unsavory characters all, they knew to leave him alone, and that was all the Listener asked for this particular eve.  
  
Not that he didn’t stick out like a sore thumb. Features as Imperial as they came, his curly black hair cropped close to his head in a classic legionnaire style, the dashing man had the sort of face so perfect you just wanted to punch it, but damn him, he’d probably be even more handsome for the crookedness of his nose! Dark eyes reflected anything he saw fit, from empathy to coldness, evil or kindness, but tonight he wore the mask of a weary traveler, just looking for a drink and a bed for the night. He’d been riding all the way from Solitude, after all, heart pounding all the way. Not many jobs made him feel so very alive! It would be hard to find such a fulfilling contract ever again, he mused into his half-empty mug. An idle ear caught bits of the conversations around him, and he entertained himself with the troubles of his fellow patrons.  
  
Maybe,if he was lucky, someone would pick a fight with him. It’d been a while since a drunken bastard had the gall to start a barfight with him, but nothing would help him to sleep easy tonight than lying down with sore knuckles painted by another man’s blood.  
  
You know. The finer things in life.  
  
“Ma! Sorry I’m late, had some temple duties to see to,” a young man in the golden robes of the clergy said, sitting down beside an older woman near the fire. He was a good-looking fellow, if a bit on the scrawny side, well-groomed with honest eyes.  
  
Already seated, the Nord lady did not trouble herself to stand to greet her son. A few lines creased her skin, but everything about her spoke of strength and resilience. “I thought you’d want to see this, Juhan. Got another letter from your brother. Sweet boy, he even sent a little coin. I tell him, he’s done more than enough to last us a year.”  
  
“That girl of his is a saint, giving the family all that money,” Juhan agreed. “What news has Olev sent?”  
  
“At the time of the letter, they’ve just arrived in Windhelm for a while, staying with some of her old friends in the Gray Quarter. He hadn’t wrote to us in so long because he was snowed in in the Pale. But otherwise, they’re all doing well. Even that odd one they picked up in Dawnstar has been growing on him. I’d say he’s happier than he’s been in a long time.”  
  
“That’s why you still won’t tell him? Ma, he deserves to know.”  
  
“He’s happy, and he’s finally using that strength of his to help someone instead of put people in their graves. What sort of mother would I be if I ruined that?”  
  
“A good one. He deserves to know.”  
  
“I can’t imagine what good it would do.”  
  
The priest lifted his hand to beckon the innkeeper behind the bar to send over a tankard of ale, which was brought by the innkeep’s wife after a few moments of bickering between the two. “So him and that girl—“  
  
“Don’t bother,” the mother chuckled, shaking her head to send little tendrils of mousy brown hair to bounce out of her messy bun. “He’d rather marry a hagraven than an Imperial.”  
  
Across the fire, the assassin snorted into his mug.  _Been there, done that._  
  
He leaned just barely closer, and made sure to look directly into the hearth to hide that he was listening to them. Sometimes, the conversations between family were the most interesting, even if they were boring and ordinary. Many years had passed since he’d spoken with his own family, and on occasion, he liked to imagine he was with his own flesh and blood again, having boring little conversations of their own.  
  
“He’s not gonna find anything better. The kinds of women he  _usually_  attracts don’t compare.” Juhan’s nose crinkled just imagining it. “Uncouth, violent… He should rethink his aversion to Imperial women. I haven’t even met the girl and I think she’s lovely! What was her name again?”  
  
A loud bang echoed through the inn as the heavy door slammed open wide into the wall, an ashen-faced man stumbling in. “Emperor Titus Mede the Second is dead! The emperor has been  _assassinated_!!”  
  
A wave of shock hit the room, and instantly what had been a dull drone of chatter erupted into gasps and debates.  
  
“Treachery!”  
  
“Villainy!”  
  
“Matter of time, after the damn alliance he made with the elves!”  
  
“He was a good emperor and a wise leader!”  
  
“Poor man,” the assassin added indolently, fighting his impulse to roll his eyes. They’d get worked up now, but he could see this lot for what they were: hardly a real Imperial among them, this city was more concerned with their petty little feuds with barbarian tribes than with anything that happened outside the Reach. He picked at the rotting wood of his chair lazily with a fingernail as he waited for the initial shock to die down so he could get to listening to some interesting conversations again. Namely, whatever that priest had been going on about. Why did it stick in his head so?  
  
His fingernail dug a little deeper through the old, soft furniture, until he’d carved a miniature shadowmark into the wood. He dug it out completely, and started on a new doodle, this time a little Daedric phrase he’d picked up back home. A curse, really, but he hardly expected anyone to recognize it for what it was.  
  
“W-wow…” Juhan sputtered. “Hadn’t expected that. Rather sudden…”  
  
“No, no… Strange goings-on have been leading to this for a while now. It’s certainly a shame, but this has been long in the making,” the mother sighed. “Good for Eha. Might mean the Empire won’t be putting as much pressure on the Stormcloak forces. And if all goes well, I know Kal has been talking about enlisting, too.” She lifted her tankard respectfully. “May Titus Mede rest well in Sovngard. For what it’s worth, he was a good emperor, and he fought hard against those elves as well as any emperor could hope to.”  
  
Gah, they’d all just be moaning about that damn emperor all night! That was no fun. And with a glance around the room, the Listener saw that spirits had died, and the atmosphere turned somber. There would be no bar fights, no insults made demanding blood retribution, no women looking to snake into his bed. Nothing. Some way to celebrate killing the emperor! The night had turned from lazy and boring to an outright waste!  
  
With a defeated sigh, the Listener set his mug down on his vacated chair and headed into the small stone room he rented. Stripping off the loose-fitting clothes he’d worn to hide the red and black Dark Brotherhood armor he wore beneath, he switched the tough leather for a softer tunic and trousers and fell back onto the hard bed, cursing Markarth and their stupid love for rock-beds all the while. Really would have been much warmer with a woman in it with him.  
  
He gazed up at the stone ceiling for a long time, much longer than it normally would have taken him to fall asleep. Their words earlier echoed in his mind, driving rest away relentlessly.   
  
Something about their conversation clawed at his consciousness, demanding to be explored! It was just a mundane conversation, it couldn’t mean anything important to him, surely, but something about it kept him awake, kept him curious and wanting more.  
  
Was it the man they were talking about, Olev? Did he recognize that name? It was just another variant of Olaf; he’d probably heard a hundred names just like it, it meant nothing.  
  
Conscience had long since been silenced in his mind, and his sense of right and wrong was always skewed, if ever present at all. Very rarely did he worry about whether or not he was making the right decision: the right decision was whatever he did, he thought. He didn’t really _make_  bad decisions, and even if the pieces didn’t fall precisely where he planned, he had a knack for making the best of it and coming out on top regardless. At least, such was what he told himself.  
  
So why did this feel so different? His heart clenched, his mind raced, and he felt like just lying on his flat slab of a bed he was on the brink of disaster.  
  
His conscience was broken, really, and his judgment was often faulty, even if he would never admit it to himself. So he fell back on his substitute, and in the corner of the room, he imagined her. What would she do? What would she say?  
  
More often than not, he didn’t like the answer he got. Her voice in his head was so painfully honest, and no matter how he wanted to continue on with his planned course of action, he knew he couldn’t defy her. When he stood over Cicero, ready to—no,  _glad_  to be rid of the pest, he’s accidentally pictured her, and the look of fear and despair in her eyes broke his heart. It was so real, so horribly  _lucid_ , like she was really there, staring at him like he was a monster—he couldn’t bear to make the killing strike, even though he knew it was just his imagination, the last shred of his sense of justice begging to be considered.  
  
And when he sat with the cooling body of Septimus Signus in the little cave far to the northeast, and his vision slowly returning as the burn of the Elder Scroll faded, he imagined her there, and imagined what she would tell him.  _Of course you can’t let them destroy Mundus! Are you insane! Alduin serves a purpose, and if serving it early is the difference between utter destruction and a new beginning, you have to let it happen. It’s for the best._  That’s what she would have said, and that was what he decided on.  
  
The Listener had no conscience. Just the precious memory of his little sister, who always knew to do what was right. Despite the grief this method of decision-making often led to, it gave him a direction when he had none.  
  
What would she say?  
  
He imagined her as he liked to remember her, with her round little face still childishly soft, her hands stained by flowers she’d been picking. She smiled, a sympathetic little smile, her eyes soft and welcoming, sweet as he remembered from childhood. Her head was covered in a wild mane of black curls that Mother had long-since given up on brushing out.  
  
“What would you do?” he asked the girl in his mind.  
  
She would go up and ask, of course. She’d go find that woman, or the priest, and ask about Olev. And she’d be so friendly and soft-spoken that they would either tell her without reservation or brush her off and ignore her completely. Poor thing, she’d just shuffle her feet and huff and sigh, and then she’d just keep asking anyone else who might spare her the time. But she wouldn’t let a feeling like this fester. No, she would take some kind of action, or at least take as much as her gentle disposition would allow.  
  
There was no harm in a straight-forward approach. Especially if it was what it would take to get some sleep after several days swimming and running from the body he’d left warm on the floor in the Katariah.  
  
When he stumbled back into the main hall of the inn, the mother and son were already gone. So he leaned against the bar and asked, “Olev. Do you know the man?” What a common name! There were probably a dozen Olevs or Olafs or Olovs in the bar right now!  
  
“Maret’s oldest? Of course. That family has ties all over Markarth, and Olev is quite loved by his siblings. He doesn’t have the proudest line of work, being a mercenary and bounty hunter, but it sounds like lately he’s been working as a bodyguard for an Imperial girl from Cyrodiil. He’s always writing home, and all the family talks about it regularly, so we hear his adventures often.”  
  
“A mercenary,” the Listener said, sinking onto a stool. “Another ale, please… This Olev, he’s with two Imperials right now?”  
  
“A brother and sister, sort of, from the sounds of it. But he’s mostly there for the girl. He’s taken her in like a sort of sister of his own, in fact. She’s had some dreadful luck since coming to Skyrim. I guess she’s suffered greatly. And yet, Olev talks about her like she’s some sort of saint. Her brother gets a huge bounty in Solitude, and she pays it off! She even gave Olev and his family almost four thousand Septims, for hardly any reason! She was almost killed by that murderer in Windhelm, and the Thieves Guild in Riften tried to off her as well, and what does she do? She goes on a pilgrimage for Mara! Never a thought of revenge! Anyway, I guess she actually came to Skyrim to track down a brother of hers who left home years ago, but the province hasn’t been kind, and luck hasn’t been with her. She still hasn’t found the one she’s looking for.”  
  
It sounded like an interesting story, but none of it really rang a bell, certainly no more than the name Olev had. But something about it pulled at his heartstrings and clenched in his chest.  
  
“And what is her name?”  
  
“Spare a coin for an old beggar?” a frail voice asked behind him.  
  
“Get out of here! Don’t go asking for coin in my business!” Kleppr spat, shooing the old man back out the door from behind the bar. “Damn vagabonds…”  
  
The Listener wracked his brain, trying to remember how any of that sounded familiar. During his time with the Thieves Guild, he was never told to kill an Imperial girl. Did that happen recently? He’d been there less than two weeks ago! Was she around when he was investigating the Butcher in Windhelm? No, none of the victims had survived when he was involved.  
  
It was the brother! He must know the brother she was looking for! The burst of heat in his heart that he felt at the realization told him that he was on the right track, that he’d made the connection!  
  
“That’s it! I’ve met her brother! The one she’s looking for! It sounds so right, that must be it!” he said excitedly, spilling some of his ale in his enthusiasm. “Tell me about him! I think I can help!”  
  
Sure, he mostly did things that involved killing or stealing, but every once in a while he did something simple and nice, like reuniting siblings. It would be a nice diversion after emperor-slaying.  
  
“Ah, let’s see… Olev hasn’t said much about the brother, mostly just that he doesn’t care for the man,” Kleppr admitted. “He’s from Kvatch, like the sister.”  
  
“I’m from Kvatch! I must know them both from back home in Cyrodiil!” he cheered.  
  
“Ah, well, that’s a good start! Let’s see, I can’t seem to remember his name… But he left home to be an adventurer at a pretty young age. Wasn’t home when his parents died.”  
  
Not that he was very much the sympathetic type, but for some reason, that little fact stung. In a rare moment of empathy, the Listener pursed his lips. “That’s… too bad, really. My parents are both so healthy and happy, I’d be shocked if anything happened to them, and heartbroken if I wasn’t there to bury them.”  
  
Kleppr nodded. “It is a shame indeed. The girl buried them both by herself. Went out looking for him right after. I guess she was evicted from the farm.”  
  
Heat filled the assassin’s cheeks. “That doesn’t seem fair,” he huffed. “She should have just stayed with my family. They’d have taken her in.”  
  
“Well, she went out looking, and came all the way up to Skyrim trying to track him down. Bah,  _what_  was his  _name_? I just can’t recall… Well, the brother and sister with Olev, their names are Cicero and Brina. And they’re looking for…. What was his name?”  
  
His mouth opened to speak, but no words came out. Eyes widened, hands shook, and his mouth remained agape, shocked, for many moments. With great effort, he lowered his mug of ale back to the countertop without smashing it or dumping it across the bar. Following a deep breath, he swallowed the lump in his throat and asked, “Was his name  _Zeno_ , perhaps?”  
  
The barkeep snapped his fingers in recognition. “That’s it! Zeno! So you  _do_  know the man!”  
  
It had barely left Kleppr’s mouth before Dragonborn’s stool slammed to the floor, his mug overturned and splashing to the floor. In two long bounds, he was banging the door open with a force second only to an atronach.  
  
“This changes everything!” Zeno Valus the Dragonborn shouted out to the swirling red and green auroras above.


	26. In Which She Flees

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The revelation that the world will be destroyed one way or another is a hard one for Brina to take. Knowing that if her brother finds her, that destruction will be infinitely worse, well... that makes it harder, to say the least. Now struggling with the dilemma, whether to run or to eradicate the threat (herself), she's quickly realizing that there is no happy ending in sight. The only thing holding her together at all is the support from her friends, and the distraction from her darker thoughts through alchemy.

### Chapter Twenty Six

Canis roots can be divided and refined in different ways to see various results. The xylem and most of the inside of above-ground portion of the plant contains the well-known attribute of draining the energy of whatever hapless creature decides to take an unwelcome munch. Concentrated and combined with other components with similar attributes, the poison can render the victim breathless and fatigued, or outright flopping to the ground uselessly.  
  
However, its outermost bark is stripped of most of those attributes, and is a readily-available remedy for insomnia. Brewed into a tea, it’s just weak enough to calm the nerves and relax a stressed body, without any adverse effects. It’s a bit on the bitter side, but I don’t recommend adding honey; it just negates the soothing effects of the tea. Once you acquire a taste for it, you’ll be a purest anyway. I guarantee it.  
  
Arcadia always was. She had enough canis bark set aside in dozens of little jars to last her for months, but her collection kept growing because she loved to experiment with new flavors. Not that she enjoyed any of them as much as she liked just a mug of plain root tea.  
  
Boil water, add the bark, let it soak until all the bark has floated to the top, and strain into a warm mug.  _Divine._  
  
And honestly, I didn’t think it would be enough. None of them did. My panic attack lasted for almost two hours, even after Elrindir took me back to rest in his bed, even after Arvid came in, sick with worry, and insisted on staying by my side as I wretched with uncontrollable sobs. Cicero held my hands in his, and tried to sing asinine little songs with me, like he had in the Sanctuary when I cried then, but nothing took my mind off of the sudden realization that the world was going to be destroyed by Alduin: and that was the  _good_  option.  
  
Olev had disappeared, and while I’d been sure he was getting horses, or a carriage, or something to get us as far from my brother as possible, he arrived a short time later with Arcadia, who fawned over me like a mother and instructed the men in brewing the tea while she dabbed my face and eased my crying.  
  
It was frothy, which meant that they didn’t take it off the heat after they added the bark, but I didn’t mind. Personally, I enjoyed the texture, something that Arcadia blanched at every time she saw me make it improperly.  
  
Canis root can also be used for potions, and has been known to make a person especially dexterous. Scouts, archers, and swordsmen swear by it. Such effects can be achieved by using the root itself, the softer black tendrils that grow the deepest into the soil. These have the opposite effects than the parts of the stump found above ground, and rather than making one sluggish or slow, it does an excellent job of giving an extra boost to gross motor skills. That said, it doesn’t do much for fine motor skills, like what one would need for lockpicking and the like, but it definitely will help refine control over larger muscle groups.  
  
Juniper and moss are common ingredients that can be combined with canis root for those effects, but if you thought the tea was bitter, you’ll want to plug your nose before you drink this one. It’s pretty disgusting.  
  
What else can canis do? Well, besides the fact that rattling off its potential alchemical uses distracted me from the horrible impulse to kill myself because my very existence puts all of Mundus at risk, it’s also said that rubbing it on trees will ward away werebears. I have yet to see a werebear, so I would assume that it works. Good job, canis root, because if werewolves make me want to soil myself, I think my heart would simply stop to meet a werebear.  
  
Anything else? Tea, fatigue, paralyzing, motor skills, not killing myself…  
  
Nothing else. Without the internal dialogue of canis root ramblings, the distinct image of me drawing Cicero’s dagger and plunging it into my chest came to the forefront of my mind once again. And while I knew it was the nobler route, the best thing for anyone, the thought of it tore another sob from me.  
  
 _Don’t think about it. Try not to think about it._  
  
Arcadia grabbed my head and tilted it back, forcing the frothy tea down my throat.  
  
Was it especially bitter? There was almost a sour taste hitting the tip of my tongue, one I hadn’t tasted in a long, long time. Was that mandrake?! I hadn’t had mandrake since coming to Skyrim!  
  
Now, mandrake is a special plant. It’s very dangerous, and while it can be used by very experienced chemists to steel the will and reinforce magical abilities, it can also cause asphyxiation, vomiting, and other unsavory things. It’s often used as a folk remedy in Cyrodiil to flush poisons out of the body, and it does a thorough, if unpleasant job.  
  
By the sourness, I could only assume that the mandrake had been treated with an alembic first, so destroy any diarrhetic properties, and knowing Arcadia, she would also have treated it in a retort to further its willpower-enforcing abilities.  
  
It was good thinking, really: a tea to calm the nerves and help with relaxation, but also to help rebuild a sense of will and resolve. What a clever tea to have on hand, one which could address emotional stresses so strongly!  
  
Not to mention it gave me something else to think about other than diving off the city walls, and slowly eroded the more dramatic of my thoughts.  
  
Arcadia stayed right by my side, and my boys, Arvid, and Elrindir took turns offering me other little shows of comfort and love. My mug was never empty, no matter how much tea I drank, and when I finally could manage to speak again through my tears, they all sat in silence, hanging off of my every word.  
  
“I need to be where my brother can never find me. The fate of the world rests on the fact that he has no contact with me,” I explained in a shaking, hoarse voice. “If I die, I can never be a threat. I either need to go to Cyrodiil, or… or I need to be out of the equation entirely. It’s not worth the risk…!”  
  
“But why?” Arvid asked. “What could you do?”  
  
“I’m supposed to convince my brother to… to make a horrible mistake,” I explained. Telling them that that mistake was saving the world by defeating Alduin may not have been met with much understanding. “It’ll doom the world.”  
  
“But can’t you just tell him  _not_  to?” Elrindir pointed out. “If you already know what mistake he might make…”  
  
I shook my head. “This is too delicate, too dangerous. I don’t want to take any chances where the fate of the world is involved.”  
  
“But you can’t seriously think that not taking chances means you have to make some sort of insane dash for Cyrodiil,” Olev said. From the other side of the fire, the red glow of the flames made his scar look like an Oblivion Gate opening across his face. “The border is closed and tightly secured. If you got across, where would you be? In a country absolutely infested and controlled by Thalmor.”  
  
I scoffed. “But in Cyrodiil, I could be anyone. There are millions of Imperials, I can blend in and disappear. Besides, what else can I do?”  
  
“I would say Solstheim, but Raven Rock’s harbor just closed.” Elrindir refilled my tea with a sympathetic shrug. “The empire has the island under a sort of quarantine as of recently. Some sort of cult causing a ruckus.”  
  
Sitting at my feet, Cicero was barely containing his laughter, which burst all at once in a high peel. “Little Sister shouldn’t fret! Oh, ho, ho! If she just keeps on looking, they’ll never find each other! She’s been looking for five whole years, after all!”  
  
“Not appreciated, Cicero,” I grumbled, taking another sip of tea. By now, the calming properties had put my panic attack completely at ease, and the mandrake had soothed most of my more melodramatic urges. Jumping off the city wall sounded less and less like a viable option with every gulp. “Knowing my luck, this is when he walks in the door!”  
  
“We’ll keep you safe,” Arvid insisted. “We can keep you hidden!”  
  
“Cicero knows how to stay hidden!” my sweet little jester sang up to me. “He knows, knows so well, how to stay quiet and hidden with a war waging right outside—how not to be caught, not to be seen.”  
  
If I weren’t being sapped of any fight left in me, I’d have been groaning into my hands. “So I just need to stay where my brother won’t go? I need to just find a little cave to hide in indefinitely? No, it makes way more sense to go to Cyrodiil.”  
  
“To  _try_  for Cyrodiil,” Olev corrected. “There’s no guarantee you can get through the pass, and even if you could, I still think you’re walking into danger.”  
  
“I need to try,” I said with all the determination my groggy mouth could properly express. Even if the tea wasn’t meant to put me to sleep, I definitely tired myself out with all the emotional turmoil today. The stress of speaking with the scholar, followed by all the sobbing, wiped me out, and I still wasn’t accustomed to crying.  
  
“Let’s get you to bed,” Arcadia suggested gently. She said nothing in protest when Arvid was the one to volunteer, and even shot him a meaningful look that I was not too tired to miss. Of course, she always wanted me to stay in Whiterun, and despite Arvid being a Stormcloak, she’d been trying to get me to marry him for a long time. Maybe she was hoping that his love for me would change my mind, and that I would decide to stay in hiding in Whiterun.  
  
I knew better, but I wouldn’t argue against the warm, solid body taking me all the way up to my room. I was physically and emotionally exhausted, and frankly, I welcomed the contact.  
  
Arvid helped me up and half-carried me up the stairs to the once-again vacant room that had been mine. Apparently, even Olev and Cicero trusted him enough to let him pull my boots off and tuck me into bed unsupervised. If there was anyone who I would expect to be respectful and gentlemanly, it was Arvid, so I let him do what he saw fit, knowing that, while I’d have to deal with him asking me to marry him and begging me to change my mind any time I might ever see him again, I’d never have to fear him taking advantage of me.  
  
“I’m sorry,” I whispered as he pulled the blankets up around me.  
  
“This isn’t your fault. None of it is. And no matter what, you’ll always have me if you need me. Just like you have everyone else.”  
  
“That’s not what I’m talking about. What I mean is… I’m sorry I just don’t love you like that.”  
  
“I knew what you meant. My answer doesn’t change.” He kissed my forehead the way he kissed me through the bars of Dragonreach’s dungeon. “Sleep well. And take care of yourself, Brina.”  
  
Sometime a few hours later, my boys joined me, and I woke up with them on either side. Thin rays of sunlight seeping in through cracks in the walls and ceiling illuminated the whole room in the most serene glow, and for a moment, I forgot all about the events of the night before, and the fact that I would destroy the world if either the Thalmor or my brother got a hold of me.  
  
But surrounding me was proof that I wouldn’t face that alone. Cicero slept with an eerie smile on his face, telling me without a doubt that I wouldn’t want to know what he was dreaming. And Olev, well, he was just like normal. He was cuddled up close, his hard muscles feeling more like rocks than flesh. It was like being snuggled up with a statue of a bear. And me, between them, small and vulnerable and weak, with the fate of the world resting on me never being reunited with the only family I had left. These two would keep me going, though. They would keep me safe.  
  
It gave me just enough hope to get out of bed.  
  
Arcadia was talking with Elrindir when I plodded down the steps. She wore a different dress than last night, so I knew she hadn’t stayed over despite how late I’d kept her up, but she had dark bags under her eyes.  
  
“Didn’t sleep well?” I asked. “You should have had some of that tea!”  
  
“I didn’t sleep at all,” she admitted, but a proud smile turned up her lips. She had a funny talent to look ten years younger just by smiling. “I was going through some of my old supplies. It’s not much, but since you don’t know where you’re going, well, I thought you could make good use of it.”  
  
Set out on the counter was one of the most brilliant sights I’d ever seen. A stone mortar and pestle, a miniature calcinator made of cast iron, and a small alembic and retort, sisters made of crystal, set in a little wooden case.  
  
If I’d had any tears left, I would have cried them all out once more. “I haven’t had my own set of tools since I was in Cyrodiil!” I exclaimed, eagerly looking over the apparatuses. Back in Bruma, before setting into the Jerall Mountains, I’d had to sell most of my belongings just to buy food for the journey. That meant my mother’s mortar and pestle and all of my other tools.  
  
But that wasn’t all. Beside it, Elrindir prepared a gift of his own. We still had Anoriath’s gear from my last stay in Whiterun, which included a backpack, a fur cloak, and a hide tent. Now, there were smaller bits and supplies, including an extra cast iron pan, a new pair of boots, a lantern and oil, and all of those other little pieces that it’s so easy to forget about. He’d also set aside enough jerky and trail rations to last the three of us more than a week on the road!  
  
It was during my embrace with my beloved surrogate mother and my favorite Bosmer that Olev and Cicero clamored down to the main level together, fully dressed and ready to go.  
  
This was the most painful goodbye yet. This time, I was certain I would never return. This time, it was a final goodbye.  
  
But what alternative did I have, other than to stick around where Brother could find me?  
  
If I happened on any couriers, I would write to them anonymously, I told myself. The Thalmor would never find out, and Brother would never need to know. But I wouldn’t let the people who did the most for me, who gave me a home and a direction and a family, become just another memory, just another pair of faces to forget along my travels. They both made the same promise: if I ever wound up back in Whiterun, for whatever reason, I could go to either of them. I would always have two places to stay and a warm fire to sleep by, no matter what.  
  
We left while the birds were still singing their morning songs. A nest right above the door to the Huntsman was noisy with chicks, a few of whom made short little loops out of the nest and back, still just barely able to fly. It was a bit too symbolic for me, and when I pointed it out, Cicero offered to kill them for me. I declined his offer, but thanked him sincerely anyway. He always meant well, even when he didn’t seem to.  
  
The guards were silent as we walked out. Leif, standing guard at the main gate, immediately looked away as I walked past. What did Arvid say? What were they all thinking of me?  
  
It didn’t matter. I’d never see them again. Elrindir, Arcadia, the guards I used to revel the nights away with in the barracks, I would never see any of them again. Maybe that’s why they couldn’t look at me: I was already a ghost to them, and they knew it. They were mourning me.  
  
On the bright side, a side I was trying desperately to keep my mind on, it was an excellent day for travel. The sun was out, there was just the gentlest breeze breathing the grasses and flowers of the tundra back and forth, and fluffy clouds sailing through the sky. Far too beautiful for all the melancholy thoughts I had buzzing around my head like a swarm of angry bees. Thoughts like how this was all just a waste of time, and if I really wanted what was best for everyone, I’d just let myself get eaten by some wolves.  
  
 _Don’t think about it._  
  
I just had to focus on other things. Like the tundra cotton!  
  
I’ll be honest. Tundra cotton? In potions? I don’t know who first came up with it, or how well their first potions worked out. But it does have some very good effects for mages. The soft, fluffy stuff, when not used for fabrics, can be shredded. In jazbay juice, those fibers dissolve, and they make an excellent potion to fortify magical abilities. Or, you can mix those fibers with extracted oil of lavender, which also grows in the tundra, and you have a great little potion for resisting magic. Useful if you think you might get throttled by a Thalmor mage at any minute.  
  
Which was a bit too much of a possibility for me at the moment.  
  
With that in mind, I was picking quite a bit of both, stuffing them into my old alchemist’s satchel. Neither of my boys complained when I went off the trail for some flower of another, or to investigate mushrooms growing on stumps. I was even able to recruit Cicero to help me pick some blue flowers that would make excellent potions for preventing and recovering from wounds.  
  
Blue mountain flowers! Who would have guessed they were so good for healing! It’s all in the petals, really. Purple and red varieties also grow like weeds in Skyrim, and while their stems and roots are all equally useless, the only part of the flowers that are different are the petals, and those each have fascinatingly different properties. Blue are my favorite, of course, since they’re most useful by far to a healer, but there is something to be said for their red siblings, which can be quite useful to a mage like myself.  
  
At my behest, we were going to go the Jerall route. I wanted the chance to see Riverwood, with Dorthe, Alvor, and Sigrid, like I promised when I first arrived in Skyrim, and I would rather go over the pass where there were less likely to be Thalmor patrols than an easier, but more defended route.  
  
No one mentioned that, once we got to the border, I would be going alone. I knew very well that Olev wouldn’t leave his homeland or his family, and that Cicero still had every intention of going back to his unholy mother. But I was keeping my mind off of it any way that I could. Namely, with alchemy.  
  
After one day of travel, we were finally making it into Falkreath hold, where the elevation went up and the tundra gave way to towering pine trees. We made camp, and I became acquainted with my new set of tools. They weren’t strictly new, but were very well taken care of. A stain of soot at the bottom of the alembic told the tale of a novice mistake many years ago. This was, by my guess, the set that Arcadia had first begun learning her trade with, which only made it even more meaningful that she would give them to me.  
  
In Falkreath hold, there’s a lot of rain. Wet conditions and lots of trees is the perfect combination of some of my favorite mushrooms, the Mora Tapinella. With those red flowers, I would be able to make plenty of potions to restore my magicka for continuous casting.  
  
For supper, we shared rations of salted venison jerky and dried fruit, and fell asleep with the fire radiating heat into the side of the tent, left open wide so that Olev could actually stretch out fully. His feet almost went straight into the fire.  
  
Our first morning waking up to the wilderness, Olev asked while breaking down the tent, “Do you want to talk this out? Cyrodiil is too dangerous.”  
  
“I’ve gone through that pass before,” I pointed out indignantly.  
  
“And you very nearly died! Now, you’re going to be going through it again, and this time, you’ll be going into a province controlled by the Thalmor!”  
  
“They won’t know me from any other random Imperial.”  
  
“Not if they know to look for you. You’ve got a distinct look about you, what with you hair and face.”  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?”  
  
“And your eyebrows!” Cicero chirped helpfully.  
  
“What’s the matter with my eyebrows?” I moaned, pulling some of my hair over my face to hide them.  
  
“Nothing. You’re just very… recognizable.”  
  
“Your hair sticks out like you’ve been electrocuted,” Cicero explained. “ _Zzzzap!_  Hah-ha-ha-ha!”  
  
I made sure they could both see me pouting the rest of the time it took to pack camp and get back on the road. This day was significantly less beautiful, with a constant drizzle of rain, but we were making good time, and got all the way to Riverwood by late afternoon.  
  
Alvor stopped his work at his forge when he saw me, and shook his head in amazement. “The little stray found her way back! Look at you! Less scrawny than when you first got here!”  
  
He was generous enough to offer me a hearth to sleep at, but I told him I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to leave my two companions out, after all, and I never would have asked him to take in all three of us. But I did stay for supper with the little family, and when Alvor asked about the state of Thrynn’s weapons, I assured him that his blade was still sharp as ever, and his bow was the envy of Riften. Sigrid reached across the small table and clasped my hand in hers; I must have looked as pitiful as I felt, just thinking about him.  
  
As if the goodbyes in Whiterun hadn’t been bad enough, now I knew I would never be able to go back to the home I had made in Riften. My idle imaginings about going back and begging at Mercer’s boots to take me back, my daydreams about walking through the market to be pulled out of the throng by Thrynn, who would whisk me away to some isolated alley to confess he’d never given up on me (like Arvid, but infinitely more romantic and just the right amount of aggressive, as per my favorite fantasies), would all just be dreams, and never true possibilities. I was letting go of so much more here in Skyrim than I had when I left Cyrodiil. Sure, it broke my heart to leave behind my alchemy tools, but to leave behind everyone I knew and loved?  
  
It was miserable. I would rather relive being kicked out of the Guild a hundred times than to feel this kind of helpless loneliness for even a minute more.  
  
I kissed Dorthe, and promised to say goodbye before we left in the morning, and went to meet my boys in the Sleeping Giant Inn across the road.  
  
Just before we all retired for the night, the door to the inn swung open to reveal rain pouring like a waterfall off the roof and a tall, skinny Nord wearing a soaking wet cap.  
  
“Are you Olev of Markarth, son of Maret?” the newcomer asked, picking Olev out with ease. And really, he was an easy man to find when you were looking for him, since he stood a full three heads taller than me and was easily taller and thicker than most Nord warriors I’d ever seen.  
  
“I am,” he said suspiciously, standing up. “What do you want?”  
  
“I have a letter for you. Your eyes only,” the courier said, reaching into a leather satchel at his side. Luckily, its contents were mostly dry, unlike the man carrying them. “Let’s see… Ah! Here it is. Letter from the priest Juhan of the Temple of Dibella.”  
  
“Juhan?” he repeated incredulously, brows rising in surprise. “He never writes. Are you sure?”  
  
The courier nodded, and offered a little shrug. “Looks like you if a wizard shrunk you in all directions? Same face, too, save for the scar. He introduced himself as such, and wore the gold robes of Aedric priesthood.”  
  
Olev was already waving the courier off before he could finish speaking. Dropping back to the bench with Cicero and I, he read through the letter, his whole face going pale until even his scar looked white.  
  
“Are you alright?” I asked, my voice low and careful.  
  
When he looked at me, his blue eyes were blazing with some emotion I couldn’t place, his jaw locked with something he dreaded to say aloud. “Brina, our rooms are the ones on the left side. Pick whichever you like, and go to bed.”  
  
“Are you joking? You can’t just send me to bed! What’s the letter say?”  
  
“I need to talk to Cicero.” Ouch. I loved Cicero and all, but if Olev was going to  _him_  for guidance before even telling  _me_  the problem at all, well, that wasn’t saying much about me, was it? The clown wasn’t exactly my idea of a fountain of useful advice.  
  
But I wasn’t wanted, and as I went into the door nearest to us, I peeked out to watch the two men leaning over, talking quietly. Cicero’s whole body seemed unnaturally tense, and I watched as his fist opened and closed like convulsions, his eyes getting darker by the second. Olev, meanwhile, was more composed at first glance, but the whiteness of his skin, like he’d seen a ghost, was now accompanied by a troubled expression, a furrowed brow and a hand that kept clamping the bridge of his nose in frustration, or something like it.  
  
Straining my ears, I could scarcely hear Olev say, “If we can’t by the time we get to Helgen, you have to stop her before she gets to the border. I’ll try to convince her before then, but you can’t let her go back to Cyrodiil. They  _will_  be waiting for her, and they will catch her.”  
  
“Yes, yes,” Cicero was hissing. “Cicero remembers, we already decided it wasn’t safe at all for sweet little sister! Cicero knows, he  _knows_  so very well, how very dangerous it is there!”  
  
“You need to promise me, though, Cicero, that you’ll protect her. She needs it. And look after her, because she’s stupid, and if she has her way, she’ll be walking into disaster on the other side of the pass.”  
  
My jester nodded dutifully, but his hands were shaking with something like rage, and his eyes were twin shadows over a sunken, somber face. His hands twitched toward his dagger, never going so far as to draw it. There was nothing for him to kill to take his emotions out on, so they festered behind his crazed amber eyes. “But… Cicero cannot stay forever… Mother needs me.”  
  
“Until your family is ready to take you back, then. I can go as far as the ruins of Helgen, but that’s only a day and a half more. Two days, if we take the longer route past the guardian stones.” Olev dropped his head into his hands. “Damn it, but I hope that’s enough time to find her someplace safe. Normally, I wouldn’t even bother going back to Markarth, but if it’s at the point where  _Juhan_  is telling me that I need to come home…”  
  
I couldn’t hold back any more, private conversation or not. Stepping back out with my nose crinkled, I asked, “What’s happened in Markarth?”  
  
Olev’s blue eyes locked onto mine instantly, and my body went rigid at the intensity of his glare. “I told you—“  
  
“This is too important. You’re leaving? Why wouldn’t you want me to know?” I squeaked.  
  
“Because I know how badly you need us with you,” Olev confessed, his eyes dropping from me in an expression as close to shame as I’d ever seen the proud warrior wear. “But Ma’s gone and gotten sick, and she hasn’t been able to work. The four thousand Septims have kept the family afloat, and will for a time, and my mother is about a strong a woman as you’d ever hope to meet, but now even my brother is telling me that I should come home. Juhan never writes.”  
  
I blanched. “How can four thousand not be enough?”  
  
“It’s not that it’s not enough. They’ve got all the money they need. It’s not about the money, though. My mother is sick, and…” He shrugged, his broad shoulders lifting and dropping like mounds of stone. “Whether or not she recovers, I have younger kin who need me. The littler ones need someone to raise them. The older ones need someone to protect them. The dumber ones need someone to guide them.”  
  
My heart cracked. I swear, I heard a little shatter sound somewhere in my chest. “And it has to be you?”  
  
“The only others who are old enough are Juhan, Eha, and Terje. Eha is a commander in the Stormcloak army, Juhan is a priest—“  
  
“Wait, one of your siblings is a priest? I thought you were completely against—“  
  
“And Terje is an idiot who would drown looking up in a rainstorm. That leaves five little ones and Terje who need me.”  
  
Damn it. All I had, the only support keeping me going, was leaving. It was just going to be me and Cicero. How had the obnoxious mercenary out to kill my brother become my closest confidant? I dropped back down to the bench, letting my head fall against his arm, and took what comfort I could from the solid muscle that cradled me. “You don’t want me going back to Cyrodiil, right? Let me come with you to Markarth. I’m an alchemist and a healer. I’ll help your mother.”  
  
He was shaking his head before I’d finished. “No way I’m letting you come to Markarth. It’s overflowing with Thalmor. No, there are plenty of alchemists and healers there. I won’t let you get yourself caught. And the same goes for Cyrodiil!”  
  
“Then where am I supposed to go?” I wailed, loudly enough for the barkeep to turn a startled stare on me. “I can’t go home—and I don’t have a home  _here_!”  
  
“Cicero will help you hide,” the clown assured me, a twinkle in his eyes. At least speaking up was giving his thoughts a direction to go in other than murder, because with every word, he seemed to be letting go of his aura of animosity. “Like I was saying before, I know very well how to keep out of sight! A war may be tearing the city apart right above you, and no one will know that you lie waiting beneath the rumble!”  
  
“And that’s how I’m supposed to live? Alone, isolated, hiding? Forever?”  
  
“It worked for Cicero!” he sang.  
  
I always marveled at the little similarities he and I shared, little glimpses like a reflection through a warped and broken mirror. I did not care to see our similarities grow any closer, though.  
  
“Besides, little sister won’t be alone! She will have me! Best friends!”  
  
“Until you leave me behind for your family, too?” I asked, a bit more acidity in my voice than I’d really intended for. “Unless, let me guess, you think I should come with you? Join your family? Be the Listener?” I knew I was truly desperate if even that horrible, dark, bloody life sounded appealing. Anything was better than living in a cave all by myself, right?  _Right?_  
  
But, to my horror, Cicero’s face fell, and his eyes refused to meet mine. “No… No, little sister should not… She should not stay with Cicero when he returns to Mother.”  
  
Not even the darkest futures I’d ever dared to picture for myself was available to me anymore. How could it be that, when I’m finally wrought with enough despair to consider going with Cicero to his mad, terrifying little family, I’m suddenly no longer worthy? It was salt on my wounds, really.  
  
So those were my options? Get caught by Thalmor in Cyrodiil or Markarth, and have them use me to destroy Mundus; stay where I could be found by my brother, and destroy Mundus; or spend the rest of my life hiding. Wouldn’t it be better if I just died?  
  
 _Don’t think about it._  
  
Around the farm in Kvatch, lots of aloe vera plants grew. Tons of them. They were fantastic for first learning alchemy, because they were used in some of the most important, basic remedies. Able to invigorate or heal, they taught me the fundamentals of my craft.  
  
When I felt truly confident in my ability to brew potions, Brother went to the market and promised to get me a bunch of new ingredients from far outside our corner of the Gold Coast. He brought all sorts of flora from around Cyrodiil, but one thing that caught my eye was something in the sheen of macerated wormwood leaves. It held a remarkable resemblance to the boiled juices of aloe vera leaves. What had begun as an experiment to pass the time produced my Brother’s birthday present, and his first ever experience being brought home by the scruff of the neck by city guards: an invisibility potion.  
  
For all the trouble we got in, I was in awe of his boundless courage and wicked sense of humor. We laughed about it for months.  
  
 _Don’t think about it._  
  
Another interesting plant from where I grew up is the golden rod plant, but the only part of it that’s really useful for anything is the seed pod. Its extractable attributes are rather random, and make for fun experimentation to a fledgling alchemist. For example—  
  
 _Just don’t think about it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was weird. Half the time I was enjoying inane ramblings about alchemy as Brina tried to distract herself from her own depression, and half the time I was writing out sad stuff. I really hope this chapter isn't too sappy or melodramatic.


	27. In Which She Chooses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Knowing she must never be found by her brother or caught by the Thalmor, Brina is on the run. All she has left are her friends, but Olev and Cicero have responsibilities elsewhere, and Brina not only faces a hard future of living in hiding, but a grim future that she must face alone.

### Chapter Twenty Seven

I couldn’t sleep. That night, I stayed up for hours making potions, refining the ingredients I’d gathered along the way and putting them into neat little vials. It wasn’t until long past midnight that I slipped into one of the rooms Olev rented, and wiggled into his narrow cot beside him. I would never feel so safe and comfortable as I did gripped in his iron arms. This was one of the last nights I would ever know such warmth.

Walking between my boys, leaning heavily on them each in turn, we set out of Riverwood as soon as I bid Alvor and his family a proper farewell at dawn.

I admit, I lied about my leg, and insisted that we stop walking far more often than necessary. They both saw through me, I’m sure, but they humored me none the less. More time was spent sitting and resting than moving, but I swore up and down that my damaged leg just couldn’t handle the journey. Our pace to get into Riverwood was the culprit, I said. We’d gone too fast, and I’d pushed myself too hard.

Cicero and Olev knew better. But like I said, neither were going to call me out on my lies, and they sat with me, patient and supportive.

Late in the day, the road meandered from the river and swooped up a hill, leading us to a beautifully carved stone platform that overlooked the water. Ancient by all evidence, with roots and vines creeping along the base of the platform, I was especially surprised by how it seemed to be frequented by travelers. The foliage falling over the surface was trained in place by the foot traffic of hundreds, maybe thousands of visitors every year.

“Doomstones?” I asked curiously.

Olev swept a hand forward invitingly and said, “Guardian stones, each tied to a constellation. They offer the blessings of the stars.”

“Mine isn’t here,” I pointed out. “There are only three. Is there a Serpent somewhere?”

“First of all, you’re a Serpent? It’s true what they say, then, ‘thrice blessed and thrice cursed,’ and all that.” I wanted to laugh at that, since only the cursed part felt true right now but before I could interrupt, Olev continued, “Second, you don’t have to pick the sign you were born under. These three are the main ones, but for all the major constellations, there are Standing Stones to offer the people of Skyrim blessings. I think you could use it.”

Stepping up onto the platform, I investigated the stones. They stood taller than me, and though they were eroded from centuries in the elements, their carvings were so deep that I could still see the runes marring the stone. Toward the top, an opening through the stone had been chipped away by a patient hand so that one could see through the hole.

“I need to stay hidden, and out of sight. For the rest of my life,” I said hopelessly. And, as I stepped closer to the Thief Stone, I noticed that in the symbols worn into the shrine, there was something like a long-necked bottle, with a swirl on the inside. “This stone also blesses alchemy?” I asked, looking over my shoulder to Olev.

“So they say,” he answered with a shrug of his heavily armored shoulders.

Part of me wanted so very badly to turn around and gain the blessings of the Mage. I could protect myself better with fire than I could by hiding, and soon I wouldn’t have any protection beyond my own two bare hands. But it was more important that I not be discovered, and soon, my potions would be all I’d have left.

Pressing my hand against the stone felt like admitting defeat. I saw a spark of light in the hole in the stone, and the constellation of the Thief peered at me through the emptiness for just the briefest flicker of a moment, before the light died and the pact was sealed.

Maybe if I was in the Thief’s domain, maybe the bad luck that supposedly plagued those born under the Serpent would no longer apply to me, I thought; of course, I knew very well that my luck had nothing to do with the wandering constellation, but it was a nice thought that lifted my spirits just a bit.

Time was moving too quickly. So soon, too soon, I would be losing my friends, the only people I had left. And no matter how many times I told myself that it was for the best, that they were going back to the ones they considered family, and I knew had survived at least well enough on my own before traveling with them, every time I dared to imagine living without them, what was left of my heart broke just a little bit more. No matter how I tried to slow our pace, we made it to the ruins of Helgen in two days as Olev had estimated.

“It’s going to be full of bandits,” the mercenary instructed us as he transferred supplies and my tent over to Cicero’s back. “So you make sure you give the walls a wide berth, and keep to the cliffs. Take your time, and if they catch sight of you, run. I know you’d love to go chop them up, but you need to make sure she gets out first and foremost.”

Cicero nodded dutifully, a wicked smile playing at the corners of his lips. The clown had his fair share of goodbyes, and seemed not the least bit upset about parting ways with Olev. I suppose when death is so commonplace in a person’s life, seeing someone leave nonviolently must never have all that much impact. He just shifted the weight of the supplies of his shoulders, and shook his head to get stray strands of red hair from his face before the rapidly dropping temperatures and the falling flakes of snow froze the locks of hair in place. “Cicero can’t make any promises.”

“Just don’t go looking for trouble. If you need to defend yourself or her—“

“Oh, they’ll be stains in the snow, and their lungs will be on the other side of the fort!” Cicero promised without missing a beat. He looked a little too eager to play out that worst-case scenario.

With the broken city still in the distance, the grey walls fading to black as the sun set in the west, Olev held me in a hug that lasted many minutes. He had to bend over to reach me, and I felt like I was embracing a bear, but he leaned into my ear and whispered into my ear, “You’re going to be alright. Just stay in Skyrim, and if I can come back for you, I will.”

I wish I had something sentimental, something for him to remember me by. Instead, what I slipped into his hand was a small crystal vial filled with an oily green liquid, the most notable product from my insomnia back in Riverwood. “Give it to your mother,” I instructed. “And make sure she gets lots of rest.”

If I’d handed Olev a crown set with hundreds of jewels, if I’d given him an axe made of dragon bone, I don’t think he’d have been half as touched as he was to receive my disease-curing potion. The tough, unshakeable Nord looked down at me with eyes just a little softer than I’d ever seen, and when he pulled me into one last embrace, he thanked me with a voice that just barely wavered. Not to let our goodbye end on too emotional a note, he ruffled my untamable hair into an even bigger mess than usual, and knocked his mouth against my temple in a sloppy kiss.

“You two watch out for each other!” he said, parting from us to veer west for Markarth.

I could have stood there, in the middle of the road, staring like an idiot, until he’d gone completely out of sight, but my trance was broken by Cicero’s black glove wrapping around my hand. With a little tug, he led me off the main road and half-dragged me the rest of the way to the shadow of the ruins. Keeping off the road meant that the bandits wouldn’t get a good look at us if we didn’t let them, but by the time we reached the city itself, we had no choice by to sneak carefully past the city wall.

Just up ahead, where the wall gave way to the wide gate and the upper ledge offered guards, now bandits, a vantage point from which lookout duty was stationed marked my first interaction with anyone in Skyrim.

Thrynn, having just left behind his old band of highwaymen in the Pale, had tried to find a new group to relive his glory days with. Within days of joining in with the Helgen band, he was placed on night watch, and witnessed the most pitiful creature he’d ever seen stumble out from the mountains, begging for a place to stay. Dumb little thing was too cold, exhausted, and starving to realize she was knocking on the door of a bandit camp rather than a proper city, and Thrynn, with his principles and morals so strange for a bandit, had tossed her some bread and gave her directions to Riverwood.

Anyone else would have let me die. Any other highwayman would have shot me down before I even approached, or let me in as I so desperately pleaded, and would have taken what little I had, including my life. But Thrynn saved me.

Just days later, he decided his glory days were not ever coming back. Being a bandit had lost its glamor, and, recalling an offer made years ago by one called Brynjolf, he decided to see if the guild in Riften was still in need of some muscle.

And they were. And that was where he found his home. For a brief time, it was my home as well, and some of the happiest memories of my whole life. The one night we shared on the forest floor felt more meaningful than any other childish escapade or dalliance I’d ever experienced before. Many evenings spent on his lap in the Ragged Flagon, or watching him practice in the cistern, had made me forget what it was like to be alone at all.

I’m glad that I didn’t go to him when Mercer kicked me out of the guild. It wouldn’t have been worth it to take his home and his family and his life away from him for my sake. Sacrificing Thrynn was difficult, but I could rest easier knowing that, though he must hate me now, though they all must curse me and despise me for reasons I can’t even begin to understand, at least he’s still happy.

By the time we made it to that lookout spot, the wall was no longer so close to the cliff and we were able to put distance between the bandit on guard and us, and cut through some brush to get to the east-aiming road. From here, I could go south, to Cyrodiil, or east, to the Rift. It was here, just out of sight of the lookout, but still with the crumbling city wall dominating our horizon and catching the last rays of sunset, that Cicero and I set up camp. Right in the dirt between the two routes, at the center of the crossroads, we set out our tent and pressed together under my fur cloak for warmth.

When was the last time I’d slept with so much space, not wedged between or laying atop my two boys? Now, even my tiny one-person tent felt like a mansion around us without Olev to take up the majority of it. The furs held me softly, but I knew I’d trade them in a heartbeat for the painful firmness of Olev’s muscles. It was just the two of us, Cicero and me, and I’d never felt colder. The decision we were literally sleeping on, this crossroads, kept me awake, and the few times I managed to drift to sleep, I was jolted awake by nightmares. Being captured by Thalmor in Cyrodiil, living alone in a damn cave for the rest of my life, there was no right answer. The mountains on one side, the road home where I had no one and nothing to greet me but enemies, or the Throat of the World and a life wallowing in self-pity? I wanted neither, but the alternative of remaining where my brother could find me and doom the world to destruction at the hands of the Thalmor was only worse.

“Cicero?” I asked quietly. “Are you awake?”

“I am always awake!” Cicero assured me cheerfully. “What does Little Sister need?”

Opening just one eye, I could see Cicero staring back at me with his amber eyes full of their usual intensity. They were flickering through emotions, from happiness to concern, love and heartache, contentedness and loneliness. He felt everything I did, but unlike me fighting against my feelings and trying to drown them out, he embraced them all equally. Maybe that’s why he’s the crazy one. Maybe.

“What would you do?”

“You mean, what have I done,” he corrected me matter-of-factly, turning his piercing eyes to the top of our tent. “Cicero could have run, but it would have been too dangerous, and without direction. He didn’t know if anyone else in the family was alive, and the war waged too deadly for him to dare searching. No, if he left, if he tried to find family, if he tried to find a new home for Mother too soon, all would have been lost. So, sweet, faithful Cicero hid away, oh yes, hid in the Sanctuary for many, many years. Felt like decades, felt like centuries, felt like a dream that passed in a single pitch-black night! But when the dust settled, and the screams turned to a whisper, happy Cicero tiptoed out of hiding, and he found that his family yet lived in Skyrim.”

“So, you really think that I should go into hiding, rather than try to make a new life from scratch in Cyrodiil?” I asked, terrified of the answer.

His mouth widened into a cat-like grin, but his eyes remained fixed on the stretched hide above us. “It worked for Cicero! And no, dear sister, it is not a matter of defeat. It is a matter of patience!”

“Patient? You?” Surely his lack of patience was what drove him insane!

But he nodded, and I watched as his eyes unfocused and lost their intensity, his gaze on something far in the past. “Patient as an assassin, waiting hours in one place for the perfect moment to strike. Patient as a knife in the dark, waiting to find its home in a man’s chest. Patient as vengeance, plotted over the years and realized as a drop of poison in a glass of wine. Oh, yes, yes, Cicero knows patience very well. What about you, dear sister? Place to place, always running, always looking for something, can you imagine sitting still and just waiting?”

“Waiting for what?” I demanded sharply. “A miracle?”

“Of course! What else?” he chuckled.

I’d had enough. Turning over to my side, I closed my eyes and forced myself to ignore Cicero’s giggles. Yet, against my better judgment, I couldn’t leave well enough alone, and whispered bitterly to the tent’s wall, “And you think I’d get more out of that, just sitting around waiting for something impossible to happen, than to go with you and become the Listener?”

The laughter ended abruptly, and I had to turn back around to be sure that Cicero hadn’t simply disappeared, so silent had the tent become. He was looking at me again, and if his stare could get any more fierce, his eyes would be glowing. “Go to sleep,” he growled in a voice as close to a threat as I’d ever heard it… well, heard it directed at me anyways.

“What? Why? Do you not think I’m the rightful Listener? Did you just change your mind?”

“No, no, of course not! Little Sister is, and always has been, and always will be the rightful Listener! She was the one Mother wanted all along, and Cicero is sure of that!” he spat. When his initial vexation subsided, I watched as his expression clouded curiously, and his eyes turned from me. He seemed to be chewing on a response for a few minutes, and I heard him mutter under his breath a few phrases, shifting them a couple times before he had his answer perfectly composed. “But… being Listener would require talking to people. Traveling. Making contacts and contracts. Little Sister can’t stay hidden from her brother with a job like that! No, sweet Little Sister would surely be found by him… sooner than later.”

Damn, and it made perfect sense, though it never stopped hurting that all of my former options were out of my reach. “Alright. You’re right.” I scooted back to him and wrapped my arms around his slender torso, and he likewise caught me in a brotherly embrace.

It would never be the same without Olev, but at least I still had my darling lunatic clown, and I wasn’t about to take him for granted. I fell asleep with my head tucked in the crook of his neck, and the last thing I saw was his eyes, once more locked on the top of the tent, staring at memories I couldn’t even imagine.

When at last sleep took me, I spent those couple of hours just before dawn dreaming of home. Kvatch, and our little farm in the shadow of that city on the hill, was my home for most my life, and the place I imagined I would live and die in. Once, when I was still quite young, Big Brother took me into town to pick up some things for Father. He led me by the hand through the city, and pointed out to me a structure like out of one of his stories. In fact, it was out of his stories. It was a broken thing, a tall oval that had come apart. Most of what was left was just the base of it, with the two sides coming up and stopping on broken points. The stone was black, not at all matching the streets or buildings, and the whole thing appeared much older than anything else in sight. Big brother pointed to it and excitedly told me that that thing was what remained of the Oblivion Gate that had opened up centuries ago. They rebuilt the city around it, but try as they might, they could never completely dismantle the reminder of what had taken place. In the end, it served as a reminder of our place in the universe. Oblivion is infinite, with Princes and Gods all of whom could push or pull us to their every whim. But it was man and mer who pushed back, proving that although we were desperate, we were not hopeless.

Looking at that broken Gate, I saw so much in my brother’s eyes. He wasn’t just looking at a relic of a tragedy, he was looking at a legend, and dreaming of having a chance like that to make a stand against what wanted to destroy us.

Desperation is lot better than hopelessness. I once told Vex something along those lines, when I first agreed to help the guild. They were distressed and anxious, watching their empire fall to pieces around them, and some of them were already losing faith that their organization could ever recover. I don’t know why I was so optimistic that I thought I of all people could make a difference for them, but I was determined to try. Was it just because I wanted to get money to help Brother? Or was it because I was looking at their own personal Oblivion Gate, and like Brother used to when he stood in the center of Kvatch, I was imagining myself going inside and closing it.

It was the same in the Sanctuary. That, that was desperation right there! But until the very end, I was ready and willing to fight to defend Cicero, even if it was the last thing I would ever do. The Listener was Cicero’s Oblivion Gate, and I would see him through it to the very end.

Desperation. Yes, I’ll take desperation any day over hopelessness. And while I might have been desperate for another answer, another option, I wasn’t going to just lie down and be hopeless. Waiting for a miracle might not seem like taking much of a stand, but I’d be damned if I’d waltz right into Cyrodiil, right into the grip of the Aldmeri Dominion, and give up.

When my eyes opened to dawn slowly brightening the flat grey canopy of clouds above, I had my answer. I took some of the stuff on my own back, and didn’t say a word of complaint when my leg buckled uncomfortably under the weight, and waved Cicero away when he tried to pull anything away.

He didn’t tell me which way to go, nor did he try to convince me or tell me what he thought I should do. Maybe it was the resolved look on my face, or the way I couldn’t even bring myself to look at the path through the Jerall Mountains, but he only smiled his creepy little smile and nodded when I set out on the road east, as if I was only confirming what he already knew.

Teetering through the mountains on a weak leg is as fun as it sounds, and as soon as we hit the higher altitude and all the ice and snow and slickness that came with, I realized I probably wouldn’t have survived the dangerous road south on my own. When I’d come up from Cyrodiil, I’d been in good health, and it very nearly killed me. Without Cicero to lean on and eventually take the supplies I’d foolishly insisted on carrying, I wouldn’t have made it more than a few miles by sunset, and never would have made it out of the pass.

Luckily, the snowfall wasn’t nearly as bad as we’d experienced traveling through the Pale. No whiteout blizzards awaited us, only flurries of fluffy white that sailed lazily down from the sky on gentle breezes, thank the eight and Talos.

And I can honestly say that there is no way to travel more entertaining than traveling with Cicero. The cold mountains and tall peaks on either side of us gave very little to be distracted by, and the scenery seemed to be an endless horizon of rocks and ice, but I couldn’t bring myself to be bored while I had Cicero at my side, singing songs, telling jokes, sharing stories to pass the hours away.

“Where was your home in Cyrodiil?” I asked.

Cicero hopped from foot to foot, dancing a little jig ahead of me on the road and walking backward to face me, his face flickering through various emotions as he sorted through the memories. He landed on a wistful grin. “Cheydinhal, and the Bruma Sanctuary before that. They both died due in equal parts to turmoil within and without, like a sick man left outside to the elements. Sad, sad, sad, but Cicero has lived on through it all, all for Mother and his family!”

I sped up just enough to catch up to my prancing companion and coil my fingers through his. “I’m sorry.”

“Hoo-hoo hoo! One does not join the Dark Brotherhood who does not have a heart steeled for death, Little Sister!”

“I get that, but still, I think you’ve had your share of hardship. You’re the most loyal, most faithful member of the Dark Brotherhood, and it seems like you’ve had to deal with the most. I don’t think it’s very fair. That Mother of yours should really give you a break,” I argued.

I was met with a maniacal cackle of laughter that lasted several minutes, and finally faded into a snake-like smile. No explanation, but as I knew too well from past experience, when Cicero laughed like that, it was better not to know what he was thinking or imagining.

“When are you going to go back?” I asked, and though I wanted to sound at ease, the last syllable squeaked as I said it.

“Oh, as soon as it’s safe to,” he answered instantly. “Mother needs Cicero! And Cicero needs Mother!”

“But how will you know?” I pressed.

Another one of his laughs echoed through the cliffs. I suppose that was as good an answer as any, since I certainly wasn’t going to pursue it any further.

He leaned against me, still chuckling, and when at last the laughter had died, he began to sing an old Cyrodiilic song. He could actually sing quite well, but whenever I joined in for the choruses, he made a point to warble and croon so dramatically that I would burst out laughing, and would suffocate all the way through the next verse. By the time I had regained my composure, it was the chorus again, and the cycle continued the rest of the song.

Before long, I had forgotten that I was wandering with no direction, no home, and dangerously little hope. Just laughing and singing with Cicero was enough for now.

It took two and a half days to begin the descent to the other side of the mountain. Coming up the other direction was a pair of men, dressed in mage’s robes and hissing curses, plodding through the snow with shoulders hunched and arms crossed tight across their fronts.

“Are you two alright?” I asked. Bundled under my fur cloak, and with Cicero beside me similarly wrapped up, their meager garb looked incredibly uncomfortable.

The taller one, a bright-eyed Nord man, grimaced at the question. “We came all this way to receive a wish, and it was all for naught! The payment is different for everyone with a wish, and alas, our price…” He shook his head in disgust.

“Our price was the blood of the other! I heard it was usually gold! For some, it was a sentimental trinket, or a small favor!” his companion, a compact Bosmer, whined. “And what’s worse, it was almost tempting! That shrine, it gets into your mind, it’s very persuasive. But luckily—“ he reached out and clutched his companion’s hand, and they shared a look so very loving and sweet I blushed and glanced away to give them privacy, “—it was a price we could both agree not to pay. Our wish just wasn’t worth as much to me as you are.”

“Wish?” I repeated. They both turned on me abruptly, and while I was sorry to ruin their moment, I continued, “If the price is different for everyone, do you think it’s worth a try for me? I could certainly use a wish!”

The Bosmer shrugged, but his Nord lover gave a hesitant nod. “You can at least hear what your price will be, and you can decide if it’s worthwhile. The shrine is in a cave just barely east of here.”

“Great! Thank you! And, ah, here!” I dug a couple of potions for resisting the cold from my apothecary satchel I had plenty left for Cicero and I to last us the rest of the journey through the pass. “Take care!”

They nodded and thanked me, but I noticed one light a magical fire in his hand as they wandered up the road together. At least mages have that advantage, I thought, and they also had one another. Though Cicero was still traveling with me, the reminder that I would soon be alone, facing the harsh world alone, made me shiver beneath my furs.

“Alright. Let’s find this wish-granting shrine!” I cheered, pulling Cicero by the hand. This was my chance! If I could just wish for Brother to never find me, I wouldn’t have to be alone! Maybe I could stay with Cicero forever, and be part of his family. Maybe I could actually go back to the Thieves Guild! This was the best shot I had.

Finally, at long last, the weight from my heart was beginning to lift. There was a chance, there was an option, there was hope! Cicero and I practically galloped down the hill, and found it with ease: a gaping hole in the side of the mountain, wide and empty and silent. How a wish-granting cave wasn’t more popular, I didn’t understand, but I wasn’t about to dismiss it when it was the only gleam of optimism I’d seen in many days.

The cave opened into a wide cavern, completely vacant with a few chairs, barrels, small things that said that this was once a bustling living space for many people, but all the furniture was old and in disarray, frosted and frozen by the chilled air. The wide caverns gave way to tunnels, and the whole cave became a rather complex hive that would have held many people.

Exploring for a few hours led us deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, until at last we found where the cave once more opened into a large open space, with benches and podiums, like a small temple.

At the middle of it, looking out across where the congregation would have met, a massive stone statue loomed ominously. A man, holding aloft a mask of his own face, stood next to a conspicuously empty space, like another figure was meant to be beside him and had been moved or destroyed somehow. Though the whole statue was perfectly still and lifeless, a voice echoed through the barren hall, “My needs are rather modest, but my offer, I think you will agree, is altruistism and generosity indissoluble—“

“No. No, absolutely no.” I was turning around before it could finish its sentence, and right at my side, Cicero was equally eager to leave. He grabbed my hand, and together we retreated from the shrine. “Not this again. Never, ever, ever again.”

“I will grant you my b—Where are you going?!” it said behind us, its voice fading fast. “How dare you turn from me…!”

“Should have guessed. Daedra. Of course!” I complained, and at my side, Cicero hummed in agreement. I was desperate, sure, but I would never let myself become that desperate.


	28. In Which She Settles Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a little shack in the southwest corner of the Rift. Maybe, just maybe, Brina can live out what's left until the end of the world there, in peace. Maybe. But probably not.

### Chapter Twenty Eight

“You haven’t written in your journal,” Cicero said leadingly as we walked to the bottom of the mountain. In the distance, we could see where the snow subsided into summer, a painfully stark contrast that had my whole body aching for warmth. “Little Sister used to write all the time, but no more! Cicero thought she was feeling… _better_?”

Better was one way to put it. I hadn’t had any panic attacks or breakdowns, and while the future was definitely looking grim, I at least didn’t feel completely hopeless. Somehow, someway, things would work out. I would spend the rest of what was left of the world finding some way to be happy, until I either died or Alduin, whichever came first. And while that certainly didn’t sound like any kind of optimism I knew of, it was the simple truth, and I was finally coming to terms with it.

“It’s not just a journal,” I told him. I’d meant to pull the little leather book from inside my satchel, but my fingers dug at only snowberries and knots of plantstuffs. “Where did it--?”

Oh, but of course! Cicero already held it, flipping through the pages with quizzical eyes, his narrow brows lifted high on his forehead. “Letters?”

“Memoirs. All the things I went through in my search for my brother that I wanted to share with him. But since that’s not really going to happen…” Though we’d just started walking, and the morning was still young, my leg stung with every labored step. So much walking! I shielded my eyes from the golden dawn and slowed my pace to a crawl, letting all of my weight rest on my good leg while I recovered.

Cicero scoffed loudly, tossing my little leather journal up in the air and catching it gracefully without even needing to see where it dropped. “Why would that matter? Why should it stop you? There are historians to record the history—but only you to record your own legacy. Besides, sometimes, just _something_ to talk to…” His voice died away, and his amber eyes strayed from mine, unable to maintain contact.

“When I’m alone?” I finished for him, and he nodded. “I know. I’ll probably get lonely. But right now, I’ve got you. So…”

Again, he nodded. “It will help. Don’t forget about it.”

Other than my achy leg, the morning had been off to a great start. But more and more often, Cicero was reminding me of our inevitable separation and the fact that I would be on my own again, forever this time. I knew he meant well. He was trying to prepare me, to give me advice for how to keep my mind. Maybe it was things he had done to avoid losing himself completely, or things he wish he’d done in order to retain a grasp on his sanity through those lonely years, but they were all pieces of wisdom I knew would shape my life. I didn’t want for my final years before Alduin ate the world to be spent in complete misery.

Would it take years? Or would it be mere months? Days? How long did the world really have left? The questions chilled me to the bone in a way that the frost and snow never could, and my stomach rolled at the possibilities. But like I always did, I choked it down, sniffed away the building tension in my nasal cavity, and forced a smile my sweet Cicero’s way.

How could it be that my life could change so much just in coming to a new province? It was a different world than Cyrodiil, and in being here, I had become a different person. Years spent alone felt like a past lifetime, and I couldn’t imagine living the kind of isolation that had once been such a given part of my existence. The me from a year ago, who’d come wandering through the Jerall Pass, wouldn’t have minded being all alone for the rest of her life, except that she would have been upset not to have been reunited with her brother. But loneliness was a long-forgotten word to that girl. I admit, I was upset with myself that I’d relearned the feeling.

“I’ll be just fine, Cicero. But you’re not gone yet! We’ve got each other, best of friends!” I sang, finally resuming my slow walk.

My jester pranced along beside me, bantering on about this, that, or the other thing. This would be enough for now. I could deal with the future when it came. And until then, it was inane songs and stupid jokes, dancing down the road hand-in-hand, and it was exactly what I needed to keep myself going.

The snow fell lighter and lighter, until it felt as though we’d walked through some invisible barrier between the seasons all at once. Stone cliffs opened into a sea of green, hundreds, thousands of swaying birch trees singing with life as far as I could see. Soft, loamy soil replaced fluffy snow, and a feeling of home washed over me.

“I suppose we should look for some place to stay,” I sighed, looking left and right through the forest. I knew from experience that these woods weren’t the safest, and hosted all sorts of aggressive denizens, from wildlife to bandits and worse. “Maybe if we can find a small cave or outcropping, that could work.”

“Ivarstead is nearby, isn’t it, sister?” Cicero asked.

“It’s maybe a day or two more to walk… I wouldn’t want to settle down in any settlement that my brother may go through, but there _are_ a few places I could live in. The barrow to the east, or there’s a little abandoned house that’s isolated across the river from the city, where I can’t imagine he’d have reason to snoop around even if he did pass through. There’s one problem, though.”

“Ooh, you make it sound so _ominous_! What did you do? What did you do?”

Despite myself, a smile crept its way across my lips at the memory. “I pretended to be a priest and exorcised the barrow while my guildmates robbed a woman blind.”

Beside me, Cicero erupted in laughter, and his whole body fell into me for support as he convulsed with guffaws. With tears in his eyes, he exclaimed, “Oh, it’s a good thing you kept those priest robes!”

And maybe, as long as I stayed in that abandoned building, out of sight, it wouldn’t have to be an issue. Trying to remember the layout of the city, I wondered how difficult it would be to remain hidden and go about my life. After all, so close to the seven-thousand steps, I wouldn’t want to be where Brother might stumble on me, and it would be unwise to assume that the people wouldn’t have figured out my involvement in the bear pelt heist.

To be honest, Ivarstead wasn’t the best possible option, but where else was there for me to go? Where else would I be safe, if I didn’t happen to find a nice, habitable cave somewhere?

We moved off the road, just into the trees, to avoid any ruffians or animals that might be out preying on travelers, and if we hadn’t we wouldn’t have seen it nestled in a copse of towering birches. A small cottage peeked through the foliage, and the closer we got, the better we could see the dilapidated little building. More like a shack, actually, it was a small structure built of wood silvered by the speckled sunlight filtering through the leaves overhead. The window was caked with dirt, but remained uncracked in the frame, and the heavy door stood firm on its thick hinges. Although the place had a distinctly empty feel to it, I knocked hard on the door several times.

“Hello?” I called. “Is anyone here?” Tugging on the door got me nowhere, and I quickly realized that was locked.

Cicero led the way to the back of the cottage, where another door led into a small, fenced-off garden of overgrown brambles. Deathbells and nightshade, mostly, which despite not being part of my usual repertoire, promised accommodating soil for other alchemically potent plants. This time, it was Cicero who tested the door, dagger drawn and ready in the event that anyone living inside wasn’t pleased at the prospect of guests. The door swung wide, unhindered by locks or bars, and Cicero and I were washed over with a wave of stale air and mildew.

Through the dust-covered window, weak rays of light illuminated what remained of a home. A bedframe boasted no straw, but instead was draped with a large canvas sack, empty and torn, suggesting whoever had last lived here had been wealthy enough to afford an actual mattress, but insane enough to want to hide out alone in a tiny cabin in the woods. Shelves along the walls were completely bare, in places broken, and I swear I could see some charred symbols on the wall. Must have been a wizard of some sort, I decided, who left the house when an experiment didn’t go as intended. You hear those sorts of stories all the time, you know.

When I turned to face Cicero, the grin on his face alerted me to my own spreading smile. We didn’t need to say it aloud, we just knew, we’d found our home.

The rest of the day and well into the night, we were cleaning and scaring mice out of the walls, trying our hardest to tear stubborn nightshade and deathbell out of the garden to make room for some medicinal plants, and collecting cuttings to try and refill the garden with.

By morning, Cicero was up and excited and ready to go with the sun just barely cresting the horizon. “You stay here!” he chirped. “Swift Cicero will be much quicker on his own, and will make sure little sister doesn’t get chased from the town for being a fake!”

I was about to argue, until Cicero finished his proposal with, “And you can get your alchemy all set up while I’m gone!”

Well. When he put it that way, there wasn’t much wrong with being left behind. I spent the next couple days while Cicero traveled to Ivarstead and back getting Arcadia’s tools cleaned and tuned up. An old table left by the former occupant of the house proved to be a perfect size for a work table, and I spent some time cleaning it and carving the various ravines and canals into its surface to help in the preparation of particular reagents. When that was done, I finished the surface with a wash of salt water in hopes to keep the restorative properties in the potions made on it effective and reliable. Once I had my new alchemy table all set up, I was back in the garden, fighting tooth and nail against the poisonous plants that made their home there.

When Cicero returned, it was with a cart full of all the things we needed to finish making the little shack into a proper house and a smile just a little wider, a little more forced, than I’d ever seen him wear. We spread thresh across the floor, filled the bedframe with soft straw and covered it with the furs we’d traveled in. To my surprise, Cicero insisted on cooking.

“What? But I always do the cooking!” I argued, flopped across the bed in a most unlady-like pose. It had been a very long few days, after all. “I can do it. I won’t use any weird herbs or anything!”

But Cicero ignored me, already lighting a little fire under our kettle in the corner. “No, no! Cicero can do it! Little Sister should just rest!” Turning to look at me over his shoulder, he nodded to the little cart of prizes he’d brought from the town. “Did you see what Cicero brought for you?”

“How exactly did you afford so much stuff?” I asked even as I tumbled from the bed and crawled to the bags. He’d only been meant to bring food and straw, but he’d returned with a cart stuffed with goods that I’d yet to even look through!

His low, sinister chuckle was answer enough, and I had to swallow down my conscience to open the sack. I already knew perfectly well what Cicero was capable of. It shouldn’t surprise me anymore, I reminded myself.

Books, seeds, an empty journal, bottles of ink and fresh quills, even clothes! Empty vials and bottles for potions, and plenty of food to last us. However he’d gotten this stuff suddenly didn’t matter. I was looking at everything I needed to have a real home here. “Cicero! This is incredible!” I cried. A new dress nested several empty vials and jars of herbs. Underneath everything, at the bottom of the cart, was fresh food, meat and produce, and it made my heart flutter to imagine the feasts we would have!

I was grinning like a fool the whole time I unloaded the cart, filling the shelves and stuffing the barely-fixed little side table with clothes.

And, as promised, Cicero did the cooking. His technique wasn’t impressive, but then, he wasn’t used to spending hours meticulously cutting slices and cooking ingredients to the perfection to best achieve alchemical results. No, he cooked for flavor, probably something he was used to having back with his family, if the familiarity he had with the ingredients told me anything. He tasted as he was cooking, looking for memories in the flavors rather than the magical charge of a potion completed.

It was a feast indeed. Seared meat, dripping with steaming juices, a stew of thick gravy and tender vegetables, and soft, sweet bread. And, for the occasion, a single bottle of Black Briar reserve to split, not enough to get me drunk, but just enough to warm my soul with the divine flavor of mead that I missed so badly. I could have cried.

“This is a proper celebration!” I declared through a mouthful of stew.

“Celebration?” Cicero blinked curiously. We sat cross-legged on the floor, plates and bowls surrounding us. He lifted his small cup of mead, but still stared at me quizzically over the brim.

I nodded emphatically and took another gulp. “Of our new home! We’ve spent days cleaning up and making it livable, but this makes it feel real!”

Those damn eyes, they always flickered through their emotions so quickly, I could never keep up. Pain, regret, hope, dark humor, and genuine happiness, all fleeting through the amber windows into his twisted little soul. At last, he decided on a stiff smile and eyes soft with something painfully like pity. He set his cup down, and I could faintly see stale blood trapped under his uneven nails. “Home, home, indeed! Hoo-hoo-hoo! A home for Little Sister, Little Listener!”

It was everything I’d ever hoped for. For years, I’d wandered around Tamriel looking for my brother, looking to achieve what I had right then. Family, home. Just me and my brother. And while Cicero wasn’t the brother I’d had in mind when I first started out, and a cabin in Skyrim wasn’t the home I’s envisioned, this was it. This was what I’d gone five years searching for. The realization had my eyes watering with joy. Alduin could eat the world, fine. I’d already won.

When we’d finished eating, and yes, we left every bowl and plate licked clean, Cicero and I sang at the tops of our lungs late into the night. Outside in my ruin of a garden, he led me in dance after dance, and long after I’d become breathless and doubled over from aching sides, he still kept me spinning and stepping. I didn’t even care when my leg began to hurt so badly I could hardly stand—at that point, he just lifted me off the ground and spun me like a child, and the song never faltered.

It was like the night I’d spent dancing under the Gildergreen, but better. Just the two of us, this would be enough. I could spend the end of days like this.

We were exhausted by the time the sun began to rise in the east, and only then did we go to the freshly made bed, soft with fragrant straw and furs.

My eyelids weighed enough to crush my whole body under the welcome weight of sleep, when Cicero stirred beside me. I’d thought him as tired as I was, but when I looked up at him, his eyes were bright as ever.

“While Cicero was in town,” he said, his voice low and dark like the deepest depths of the Dawnstar Sanctuary, “a little bird told him some very big news…”

Though my eyes were desperate to flutter shut, I kept them trained on him, forcing my attention through my grogginess. “Hmm?”

“And Cicero learned… That the Emperor is dead.”

That woke me up. I bolted straight, crying, “Emperor Mede is dead?!” As quickly as the shock had taken me, I felt myself rolled over by melancholy. “Is that… is that what our little party was for? In his honor?”

A gentle hand pulled me back down, and I relented, settling my head on Cicero’s shoulder, careful not to pull any orange strands that pooled on or around it.

“Not exactly,” he breathed, and closed his eyes, but he looked far from peaceful.

I awoke to midday sun streaming through the window, lighting my beautiful little cottage in a pleasant glow. The shelves were filled, the alchemy table was clean and stocked, and I had everything I could need or want—

And I was alone.

I was consumed by melancholy, and after a few days of wallowing, resolved to finally end my depression by opening the leather binding to the pristine new journal Cicero had included in his parting gifts.

 

_Fourteenth of Midyear, 4E 202_

_This new journal shall mark the beginning of a new chapter. Unlike my old journal, which was dedicated to an old life, gone for good, this one shall focus on my new life here in the Rift. To be specific, I shall use this journal to record all things alchemical._

_Note to self, ‘All Things Alchemical’ would make a catchy name for an apothecary._

 

_Sixteenth of Midyear,_

_I thought about inserting old scraps and notes I’d taken in the past, but realized I don’t have anything else to pass the time with. Therefore, I will transcribe all of my old notes here, as well as include some extra commentary that I left out before. Oh, and illustrations. Not like I have anything else to do._

_Really, I pass the time with nothing but my potions and experiments. Gardening gets me by. At night, I’ve taken to playing Janan’s old music box. It clears my mind before sleep, as I find I can’t manage to close my eyes while I still have elixirs and potables rattling in my head._

Night was the worst. Janan’s strange little kalimba was therapeutic, and it gave me something else to think about outside of my consuming obsession with alchemy. If I wasn’t thinking about my experiments or plants, I was tormenting myself with thoughts of the people I’d left behind.

My brother, Arcadia, Arvid, Suvaris Atheron, they all haunted me with memories I wished so badly to return to. I could lie awake for hours imagining what the guild was up to right then, who was in the Flagon, who was winning at cards and who Mercer was dealing stern warnings to. In my darkest times, I was kept awake by torturous memories of Thrynn. The brief romance we’d shared, the way he held me, the smile always just barely turning up his lips whenever he saw me, oh, how I could waste the nights away closing my eyes, imagining him there with me. And when I stared up at the thatch roof, satisfied only as much as much as my fingertips and fantasies could leave me, I wondered if he’d already found a new lover, if he had trouble remembering my name, if he ever had reason to think of me at all. If he did, surely it was only with resentment. The whole guild, all the friends I’d made, would hate me now. Even if I crawled out of my miserable hiding, they’d be the last to express joy at my return to the world of the living.

I was dead to them. I was dead to the world. But I wouldn’t cry, not anymore. I let myself go ever since the Sanctuary with Cicero, but not anymore. When I felt myself about to cry, I looked to the sky, counted the stars, held my breath and watched the auroras dance overhead, apathetic to my pain.

That strange little kalimba, with the tines wound into loops at their bases to sing echoing melodies that reverberated off one another to fill the air with a chorus of sweet chimes, it forced those thoughts away. And for about an hour every evening, it restored my sanity. Sheogorath may have been standing patiently on the other side of my door, but I wouldn’t hear him knocking over the gentle songs that eased the weight in my heart.

Just enough to last me until the next night.

 

_Twenty-Second of Midyear,_

_Some children playing in the forest got lost. Very, very lost. I heard one crying while out picking flowers for an experiment with mountain flowers I’d been planning, and had run in his direction without so much as a second thought. Poor things, a pair of little boys who thought they were much tougher than they were, had run away from home to join the Stormcloaks. I didn’t have the heart to tell them they’d gone in the exact opposite direction, but they knew well enough that they were definitely not in Eastmarch._

_It gets worse. When I finally found them, they were scrambling up a tree, surrounded by wolves. The wolves had gotten a good bite out of the crying one, but it was only a matter of time before the wolves got them both. Judging by how skinny they looked, the wolves certainly would have outwaited the children._

_A few fireballs later, and I had the children inching out of the tree, sobbing their appreciation. But I couldn’t very well just let them wander off to find home again, and certainly not in their condition. I brought them back to my cottage, fed them (pheasant marinated with honey and silverside perch oil to help them regain their energy. See back of journal for recipe. DO NOT USE THE RECIPE LISTED ABOVE! ATTRACTS FAR TOO MANY MOTHS!), and went about healing their wounds. The one who’d been bit, I administered a potion to eliminate rockjoint, and for both I used a combination of blisterwort potions and healing magic to repair bites, claw marks, scratches, and all the other little injuries incurred by prattling aimlessly through the woods for a day and a half. They’re sleeping in my bed now, and I’ve stayed awake the whole night, preparing potions for them to take back home. Just in case the rockjoint proved suborn, or what have you. I’ll help them home in the morning._

 

_Twenty-Fifth of Midyear,_

_I’ve returned from Ivarstead. The children are home and safe. I didn’t go into town, for fear of being recognized, or on the chance that my brother might be in town or near. But I’m glad to know that, even in exile, my healing and alchemy can be of use._

 

_Twenty-Sixth of Midyear_

_I’ve added to my chart of known attributes in fungi. Recent experiments with scaly photiola have proven remarkably educational._

_In other news, the nightshade in the garden has sprouted again, and though I thought I’d removed any deathbell roots, something seems to be choking out the thistle I was trying to grow. I will remain persistent. There even seems to be spiky grass popping up. Spiky grass! The soil is all wrong for it. I’ll be testing it out to see if this might be a variety that I’m unfamiliar with._

_I think it’s also worth noting that I have befriended a butterfly. Though I’ve been able to coax it into staying in my little shack with a mixture of ground beehive husks and pollen from the nightshade plants, I have placed it in a jar to be extra safe. I’m very interested to see why a common butterfly would be attracted to a mixture so magically potent, and perhaps may learn more about the nature of butterflies and their alchemical properties._

Weeks passed. The only way I managed to keep track of days was by writing as often as I could, and by measuring the fermentation of different potions and concoctions.

Every now and again, a traveler would come through, and as summer came in full force, the number of people taking the pass increased. Tucked away behind the trees, I could watch them go without fear of being discovered unless I wanted to. 

And I thought I never would want them to. I was out picking mushrooms from a stump, squatting right off the road in the thrush. The clanging of armor was unmistakable, rattling up from somewhere behind me, so like a rabbit, I edged my way deeper into the foliage.

They walked in a tired formation, a half-hearted attempt to keep the tight lines expected of disciplined legionnaires. Furthest to the right of the line, one soldier walked with a distinct limp, and I could see bandages shoved haphazardly into the spaces of his leather armor, and his face was discolored with blooms of purple and yellow across the left side. His companions sported dents in their armor, bruises and cuts where their skin showed, but none looked as bad as the unfortunate scout.

Though they lived to return to camp, their faces showed no pride of victory.

“You—you look _awful_ ,” I blurted, popping out from the bushes.

Seven weapons were drawn in an instant, all pointed at me. Eyes wide, they glanced between me and each other, deciding if the daft woman knee-deep in brambles with hands full of mushrooms was a threat. That I’d decided to wear my tattered priest robes today probably didn’t help, but at least they must have made me look less like a hedge witch.

“Back away, citizen. This doesn’t concern you,” one ordered sternly.

“No, sorry, I—wait! Don’t go! I’m an alchemist. And a healer. And you really don’t look good. There are bears and wolves all over these woods, and if you have much further to walk, I don’t know that you’ll all make it.” A hopped backward when one took a menacing step forward, and tripped over a root to land painfully on my backside. “That wasn’t a threat! It was an offer! I live very close, just let me grab some potions! I can have you good as new! I promise!”

“Absolutely not—“

“Oh, thank the Eight!” the scout exclaimed, dismissing his commanding officer entirely. “We need it! I need it! I was sure I would die before getting back to camp!”

Half the soldiers looked to him incredulously, one saying, “Are you mad? What if she’s a rogue mage? What if she turns us into pigs?”

“She’s not a hag! Look at her!”

“Exactly. _Look at her!_ She’s insane, living in the woods!”

“If you don’t want me to heal you, you don’t have to let me,” I chimed in, picking myself up from the ground and shaking dirt from my backside. “But let me heal those of you who do want it. I only want to help.”

I hurried all the way back to my cabin, scooped vials into my satchel and filled the bandolier Tonilia gave me with even more. Fast as I could, I ran back to the road where I’d met them, heart racing with hope that they hadn’t all left.

They all stood in the exact same spots. The scout was kneeling, and a few soldiers removed parts of their armor to allow me better access to their many wounds. A few kept their distance from me, and two still had their swords at the ready, but otherwise no threats were made.

My first priority was the scout, who by far had the worst of it. I started by giving him the most potent healing potion I had, which would hopefully speed his recovery tenfold. Then, sitting at his side, I charged his leg with healing energy straight from my hands, and worked my way through the worst of his injuries. Before their eyes, the legionnaires watched as the bruises across his face faded, the swelling died, and even an old scar from his first days as a recruit was wiped clean from his brow.

“Who’s next?” I asked as I stood, and was met by every other soldier, even those who’d been skeptical, all eagerly volunteering.

When everyone had been healed, the sun was just beginning to lower in the west, dipping behind the mountains. I passed out potions of every variety, bidding them to use whatever they needed and to bring the rest back to the camp—it was, after all, my duty as an Imperial woman to do all I could for the Empire and its enforcers, I told them proudly.

“If you want, my home isn’t far. It’s not quite big enough for everyone, but it may be safer than setting up camp elsewhere, where you might accidentally be in a bear’s domain. And I can cook you all some supper.” It would just be nice not to be alone anymore. I missed sharing a meal with someone else.

“Thank you, miss, and you’ve done the empire a great service,” the commanding officer said, smiling through his scuffed helm. “But we need to report back to camp. If we march through the night, we can get there by dawn.”

“So, the camp is really close?” I asked. “I’ll keep my eye out for more soldiers traveling through!”

I hugged them when they left. I could tell they all thought I was touched in the head, but truly, I was just so lonesome. The cold armor reminded me of Olev. The scout’s slender form, wrapped in supple garb, was like Cicero.

Gods, I was pathetic. I watched them all the way done the road, until they disappeared into the forest, my feet itching to follow them with their every clanging step.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long delay between chapters! I admit, I fought with this chapter a lot because for a long time, I was intent to make it one with the next chapter as well. But, as it worked out, it's going to be a sort of two-parter chapter thing. Hopefully it works. But, since the chapter has been divided into two, you'll have to deal with Brina's Pity Party just a little while longer than I'd intended for you to.


	29. In Which She Heals The Rift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's hard to be a hermit when your first instinct is to go out seeking trouble. It's even harder to be a hermit when you're quickly building a rather extreme reputation for yourself.

### Chapter Twenty Nine

_Twenty-First of Sun’s Height,_

_Weary wanderers with coughs wracking their bodies, soldiers with sloppily bandaged wounds, they all were met by scrawny little me, just a bit too eager for the company and weighed down by potions. I must have been very close to that camp, because legionnaires are my most common visitors, but more than a few mages on quests, traders on their way to market, mercenaries looking for wealth, or pilgrims seeking the favor of the Gods were met by me._

_It’s a terrible excuse for a life in hiding. I know I’m coming out whenever I get even the smallest reason. But what can I do? How can I let people pass me by when my life’s work is in the remedies to all their ailments? If my life is wholly dedicated to my practice as an alchemist, how could I ever sit idly by, filling my stocks with potions I’ll never have need to drink?_

_Twenty-Seventh of Sun’s Height,_

_My potions have proven remarkably effective, even in less-than favorable conditions. For all of my practice, I admit I never imagined that my elixirs could be so potent. It’s pleasing, if a bit humbling to think of how far I’ve come._

_In fact, it was a bit frightening. In this particular case, my potion worked nearly instantly, and with a high magnitude the likes of which I’d never even heard of in a single brew! Have I truly come this far, further than I’d ever thought possible, or was this just a moment of rare luck for me?_

 

“Hail, traveler!” I’d been watching him slowly teeter along the road through the trees. I knew all the good lookout points, and with a bandolier filled with invisibility potions and other goodies, I had no fear of being spotted by anyone I didn’t want to see me.

I decided instantly on seeing him that I would meet him at the road. He moved at a pace even slower than me on my worst days, but it didn’t seem to be trouble with his legs. I imagined a general fatigue, maybe shortness of breath, perhaps a general pain throughout his whole body. Most likely illness rather than injury. I had potions for that. I had potions for everything.

If I’d been a sabre cat with blood in my maw, I don’t think I could have surprised the traveler any more violently. With a start like a zap of electricity, he showed more vitality than in the miles I’d watched him when he jumped into the air, skittered backward, and drew his dagger menacingly. Well, as menacingly as he could, with how sunken his face and how pasty his skin all was. He looked a damn mess, that was for sure. All bundled beneath a heavy cloak, I wondered how he could stand the heat in the summer sum.

“No, no, don’t worry! I’m not here to hurt you! I just noticed, you don’t look very well. I was thinking, with your slow pace, you might have rockjoint, but if that were the case, you’d also have a fever, and that cloak would be unbearable. So then I thought, ataxia! It would also explain why you’re so pale!”

My guest wasn’t entertained by my rambling, and my voice died as I watched his dark, dark eyes narrow into a malicious glower.

“Or…” I sputtered, realizing my horrible mistake, “…it could be an advanced case of porphyric hemophilia…”

_Correct!_

My patient lunged for me, forgetting all about the pain of the sunlight, his face consumed with agonizing thirst.

Vampirism is an interesting magical disease, and I really wished I’d done more research on it. But I knew the basics. Sunlight makes them weaker, they get stronger the thirstier they got, and they don’t make good friends with fire.

Gouts of flame erupted from my hands like ash from Red Mountain, and it was a good thing I managed to react so quickly, because the man was on me in an instant. As jagged nails dug into my arm, I set my hand between his face and my neck, lighting him like a pyre before he could take a bite of me. When he recoiled, stumbling back and shrieking in pain, his face was horribly burned, especially around his mouth, but he was far from finished with me.

His dagger swept out wide for me, and I had to stumble away to keep from being gutted, but luckily I didn’t need to be near to send more fires his way. I focused the heat directly in my palm, making a ball of concentrated flame, and as the magical energy reached its peak, it launched from my hand and into the vampire, driving him back a few more steps. As the distance between us increased, I knew the vampire was less and less of a threat. But all it took was two long bounds of his long legs to put him right back in biting distance, much to my peril.

Running was out of the question. As soon as I turned my back on him, he would be on me, and I knew that, with the promise of a meal, he’d outrun me. And I couldn’t skitter backward anymore without putting myself in the brambles, in which case, I’d have no mobility and would meet my end by tripping over a root.

There was no getting away, and he was only getting closer. I drew in a deep breath, closed my eyes, and knew that what I was really going to be putting my faith in was my potions, in the end.

Like needles. Not like hound’s fangs that tear and rip, but like the very razor tips of daggers, or like long knitting needles with perfect edges. I wasn’t expecting the bite to be so smooth, so easy, almost painless. Really, the only reason I realized I was in pain at all was because of the terror gripping my heart.

Maybe he thought he’d successfully enthralled me, making me a willing victim, and that was why I hadn’t run. Vampires can do that, charm people so that they’ll let them take a bite. I knew better, of course. I’d been able to resist the persuasion of Daedric Princes—if this ragamuffin vampire buffoon thought he had anything on Sanguine, he was dead wrong.

I wasn’t willing. I just couldn’t run away fast enough. But from right here, I knew what I had to do. 

When the jaws snapped shut, just over my collarbone, and I felt my blood all rush to that spot, I threw my hands on either side of the monster’s head, like a lover holding him to the kiss.

Then, once again, I let my hands overflow with magical fire, hot and bright as the sun.

The vampire slumped against me, not dead, but still ready to fight and eager to draw more blood. Still clutching his charred head, I pulled him back, and he obeyed, snarling a curse at me through blistered lips. I held him back with one hand, and with the other, pulled from my bandolier the potion I’d been planning to give him from the beginning.

I uncorked it and began pouring it into his mouth in a single fluid motion, before he could make sense of what I was doing.

Then he fell to the ground, choking and hissing, enraged as I’d ever seen a man.

“You bitch! What did you—what in Oblivion did you _do_ to me?! Damn you—I’ll--!”

“You’ll what, chomp at me with your blunt little teeth?” I scoffed. My boot came down on his bowed head and pushed him prone onto his back. “Want to know what I did to you? I healed you. It’s what I do. I’m an alchemist.”

The eyes that stared up at me incredulously shone pale blue instead of their former midnight black. He held his hands in front of him, and though it would take weeks, maybe months for him to fill back out to normal human proportions, already a pink flush was returning to once-alabaster skin, a transformation which he watched with indignant fury. “But—that’s impossible! I’ve been a vampire for centuries! How can a simple potion remove the gift so thoroughly?! So _instantly_?!”

“I’m a really, really _good_ alchemist,” I growled, pulling another potion from my bandolier, this one to cleanse myself of any infection that he may have spread by his claws or fangs. Without taking my eyes off him, I pulled the cork from the top with my teeth and as I spit it to the ground, I rumbled, “Now get out of my forest.”

And he did, leaving me to stand there, barely holding up a thin façade of confidence and strength until he was out of sight and I could fall to my knees.

 

_Twenty-Eighth of Sun’s Height,_

_My skin has developed a rash, just below my left knee. So far, topical remedies have been most effective, but I admit, I’ve been using the opportunity to try out a few new ideas and experiments. I never imagined I’d use myself as a test subject like this, but at least it’s giving new potential to my research._

_Twenty-Ninth of Sun’s Height,_

_The rash is completely healed. In only a day! As a research opportunity, this is actually quite disappointing, as I had several new recipes I very much looked forward to testing. I never thought I’d be so bored that I’d feel a loss at healing a rash. Hopefully some travelers will come through, in need of assistance again. I could use some ~~company~~ opportunities to try new recipes._

_Thirtieth of Sun’s Height,_

_I mustn’t dwell on the bad. I keep telling myself that. This has been a trial, but of all the places for me to decide to settle, this place is indeed a blessing. In fact, I ought to stop thinking of it like a punishment._

_Coming to this area was a brilliant decision! The local flora seem to have many useful properties that I've been able to utilize into new potions! Outside, the rich soil has allowed the cuttings I've collected to grow into fine and bountiful plants! (Assuming, of course, that the weeds finally relent.) This afternoon, I think I will journey out for more mushrooms, as my current supply is beginning to dwindle._

_On a personal note, I have moved my alchemy work outside the shack. I find the midday air is a boon to my health, as well as inspirational to my work._

_So, see? It’s not so bad. Not at all!_

 

For once, I wasn’t the one sneaking up on passing travelers. I was rummaging through the forest floor, rolling over fallen trees to get at the fungus growing beneath until a shadow fell over me, stealing the breath right from my lungs.

Already on my hands and knees, I whirled around, quick as I could on the unaccommodating terrain, to face what I was certain would be a towering werewolf behemoth.

I wasn’t far off. The Nord man was massive, and furry as a bear, but on his back was the slight body of a woman. She had a pale, oval-shaped face, like Secunda waning, glistening with a sheen of sweat.

“You, girl,” he begged, “have you seen the spirit? I’ve been searching the woods for days, and Ester doesn’t have much time!”

“Spirit?” I stuttered, shaking my head. I rocked onto my feet, heart still pounding from the fright. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen anything of the sort. What’s the matter?”

Crestfallen, he pulled the woman off his back, laying her gently on the dew-covered forest floor. Whilst wiping a hand over her brow, he said, “They say there’s a guardian spirit somewhere out here who grants miracles, especially when it comes to healing the sick and wounded. I thought it would be Ester’s only chance…”

“What’s wrong with her?” I could cure her, I just knew it, but if he already knew her peril, that could save me valuable time in preparing a remedy.

“Chrondiasis,” he said miserably.

Oh. Damn, but that was a new one for me! “Oh, dear. I’ve only briefly heard of the disease, but I’ve never seen it. It’s supposed to be incredibly rare! Haven’t you tried potions? Or has the temple been able to help?”

“Potions do nothing, and the priest has only been able to keep her alive longer than expected. This rumor of spirits was my last hope!”

Would I do this? Would I take a patient, just to know that I probably wouldn’t be able to save her?

Better yet, would I refuse to help just to spare myself the guilt of her dying while under my care? I knew very well what I was potentially putting myself through, but I knew I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t at least try.

“I don’t know about any spirits, but maybe I can help. Let me… let me just try a few potions,” I said, digging into my satchel. “Pour this into her mouth. And—and this one, too! They should keep her stable until I can brew up something more! Just—just wait here!” I couldn’t have people knowing where my shack was, and frankly, I didn’t think that moving her any more would be wise. She looked so frail, so weak, I prayed to Mara the whole way to my shack. We had our differences Mara and I, and I’m sure I didn’t exactly make her proud in Dawnstar, but if any of the Divines were going to care what I had to say at all, it would have been her.

One claw’s worth powdered bits of mudcrab shell. Seven long hawk feathers, quills removed, shaft intact. Enough fur of a skeever to fill the space between my fingers when I hold my topmost joint of my index finger to the middle joint of my thumb, dissolved in the juices of a sabre cat’s eye and boiled.

Mix them, vigorously, and don’t mind the fizzing of the eye juice, then let them burn into ash together in the calcinator. To make it drinkable, dissolve the ash in a quality solvent, like water filtered through birch bark.

I purified it through my alembic, boiling the mixture so aggressively that I worried I would shatter the crystal container.

Run the whole thing through a sieve, into a clean crystal vial, and stop with a cork soaked in salt water.

But that wouldn’t be enough! This had to be a perfect potion, it had to be enough to cure what not even the priests could not! And it wasn’t just a simple disease! I had to be smarter than it, to be prepared to cure more than just a common cold! I didn’t know much about chrondiasis, but I did know that it was a magical disease, often affecting mages most severely. If it was all the knowledge I had, I had to make good use of it!

Red mountain flower, the petals from five blooms, diced! Three mora tapinella (the prizes from my mushroom hunting before the interruption), gills removed and caps cleaned! A fist full of jazbay grapes, juiced _mercilessly_ , their corpses discarded! Boil like a tea, but leave the macerated bits in, and pour into a waterskin! Wrap the waterskin in clothes or something—it’s best drank hot!

It wasn’t as much time as I’d like to put into the most concentrated, purified disease-curing potion I’d ever made and its magicka-healing sister, but time wasn’t on our side. As it was, I’d been gone from them nearly an hour.

I ran back into the woods, not at all minding the searing pain in my left leg from overexertion, not at all slowing to the whipping branches or scratching underbrush. I was thankful that, when I returned, the Nord was still there, and his lady was still wheezing shallow breaths.

“This one first! Then the hot one, right after, all of it!” I commanded, shoving the potions into the Nord’s hands.

“But—“

“Just do it! You pour, I heal!” I didn’t give him a chance to hesitate, I just pushed the potions off on him and let go, moving my hands to trace golden lines of restorative energy over her forehead.

Watching her choke on it made me cringe. Damn, she would cough it all up before it could do her any good! But with my insistent flow of magicka into her, calming the malignant disease just enough to give the potions a chance to take effect.

“Is it working?” he whispered, and I could see the faintest trails of saline disappearing into his thick black beard.

“Just make sure she drinks as much as you can get into her mouth,” I said. “And for the second potion, hopefully she’ll be awake enough to chew the pieces. Those are important!”

He nodded dutifully, carefully lifting her from beneath her shoulders to help her in the process of swallowing my elixir. For a few agonizing minutes, the only sounds were the distant trills of pine thrushes and the wind sighing forlornly through the trees. It seemed to wrong, so ill-fitting, for her to die on such a beautiful summer day, amidst the singing birds. Rays of sunshine slipped between leaves overhead, dotting her face, beautiful even in sickness, with yellow spots of light. The somber mood between me, my patient, and her lover was so diametrically opposed to the rest of the world around us, it made the horror of her plight all the more poignant.

By the time the first potion had completely been drained into her lips, her eyes just barely opened, golden lashes fluttering as though she were waking from a long, deep dream.

“I think she’s coming to!”

“Good,” I sighed, falling back onto my haunches and letting my hands drop from her hairline. I pulled a potion to restore my magicka from my satchel; there was no time to rest, even if my head was spinning from the drain of aetherial energy from my body. “Don’t stop now!”

The already-bright morning turned brighter. As she stirred, and her lover’s heart visibly lifted in his chest, finally the events of the day were matching the cheerful song of the forest around us. Long after she’d consumed the last of the potions, I still streamed warmth from my hands to her head, clearing out whatever might remain of the deadly infection. 

“By the Nine, Ester! I thought I’d lost you!” Watching him crush his lips against hers, somewhere between elated and desperate, it was all I could do to look away and force my thoughts from my own loneliness.

I left them to fawn over each other and celebrate her return from the brink of death in privacy. I had all I needed from the experience: I’d rescued her from certain doom, a feat beyond the capabilities of any apothecary or priest they’d gone to yet, and I’d done so in tight time constraints, all with ingredients I’d had on hand.

I told myself all the way home that I’d left because my part was done, because I had succeeded and I had notes to write. It certainly wasn’t because the look he gave her reminded me so horribly of Thrynn, that his deep voice and the way he held her caused me to reminisce on the night we’d shared on the forest floor ourselves, or that I longed to be adored like that, or just to be loved at all.

 

_Fifteenth of Last Seed,_

_The summer has been good to me. I remind myself of this whenever I can. The forest has been bountiful in useful ingredients, and my time has been spent making great progress in my research. Alas, I’ve given away almost every vial and bottle I had. It is with much trepidation that I go to Ivarstead in search of supplies. I pray I am not discovered. I set out tomorrow. Until then, I must keep my fears from getting the best of me._

 

Imagine my outright shock when I was met by a wide smile by the innkeeper.

“I was wondering if you had any… empty bottles?” I asked. I’d only bathed in rivers the last two months, and I must have looked feral. I took great pains, however, not to look like the priest who expelled the spirit haunting their barrow. My messy hair was piled on my head in an attempt something like a style, and I wore the clothes given to me by Ama Nin.

Despite my best efforts, the light of recognition was clear on his face—and the faces of everyone else in the inn.

“Bottles?” he repeated, seeming confused at first. But, with a shake of his head and a whisper of apology -- _apology?_ For _what?_ \-- he knelt down and pulled some out from behind the counter.

Three in all, but it was no surprise. Why would anyone just keep empty bottles lying around? It was better than nothing, and I did my best to veil any disappointment as I reached for them.

“No, wait!” the innkeeper said. “Wait until tomorrow. I can have a wheelbarrow full of bottles by morning!”

Something seemed strange. Off. I straightened as tall as my stature was capable, and pursed my lips with suspicion. “Why would you do that for me? And besides, I can’t hang around all night waiting!”

I wish I were better at reading people. I really, really do.

“Because of everything you’ve done for us. Cleansing the barrow with your powers, healing our sick and wounded, guiding children home—it’s the least I can do. I just want to show you—we’re not afraid of you. And that the people of the Rift welcome and revere you.”

What in all of Oblivion was he talking about? “I don’t follow.”

Abashed, he bowed his head. “I—right. Of course, my mistake, miss. But the offer stands, you can stay here for the night—no charge! And I’ll have every bottle in town ready for you in the morning.”

If I wasn’t so desperate for them, I’d have walked right out of the inn right then. But I was being offered a free bed, in a town, where people were… and enough bottles to hopefully last me a few more months. I swallowed my hesitation and forced a smile onto my face. “Which room is mine?”

I spent a few hours out in the main longhouse, enjoying the blazing hearth and the whispers around me. The place filled as night fell and the farmers and fishers and millworkers all came in to relax away the aches and stresses of the day.

Of course I noticed that no one seemed to want to get near me. They gave me a wide berth, and more than a few words were whispered behind hands, eyes glancing my way.

All I could think was, _What has my brother gone and done this time?_

But, truthfully, the company was such a welcome change from my usual routine that when I finally retired for the night, I was more at ease than I had been since my last night with Cicero.

Falling into bed, I pulled out Janan’s music box, as it had become a nightly ritual of sorts for me. After plucking the tines to release just a few lingering notes, I realized that, at least for tonight, it wasn’t necessary. I fell asleep easily, only barely aware that the whole inn had gone deathly silent at the sound of the kalimba’s song.

When I woke, I couldn’t stop smiling. I felt rejuvenated, reborn, ready to go back into my exile with a renewed resolve. As promised, a wheelbarrow filled with bottles of all shapes and sizes, apparently gathered from every home in town.

A crowd had gathered, what appeared to be nearly everyone in town, to see me off. They stood far from me and the wheelbarrow offering, but I heard the voice of the boy I’d saved many weeks ago ask, “What does she want with them?”

“It’s not for us to ask,” his mother scolded.

What strange folk. Really, Ivarstead must have been the strangest town in Skyrim. But who was I to complain? I was a crazy hermit living in an abandoned house in the woods.

I dragged that wheelbarrow all the way back to my little cottage, excited to get back to work and continue my research. It was midday the next day when I arrived home, and instantly my smile dropped.

“What happened to my door?!” I exclaimed, rushing to my poor little house. My door, my wonderful, beautiful, heavy door with a solid lock, was mere splinters littering the ground. “And my window?! And—my _other door_?!”

The whole place was wrecked! The window had been broken out and shattered, and the back door was knocked so hard off its hinges that the whole frame had come apart in the wall. My shelves were ransacked, and my heart broke to see the place my little butterfly’s jar had once rested was now empty.

The bastards broke both my doors, my window, and stole my butterfly!!

It didn’t make much investigation to see that it’d been more than a passing bandit. Outside, the ground was charred, still smoking in places, from a magical fire. Footprints all over told me some sort of battle had taken place, but no bodies or great amounts of blood indicated that the battle had escalated to murder.

Whatever happened, it was a lucky thing that I hadn’t been there to get caught in it, I mused as I began picking glass out of my bedstraw. Down on my knees, combing through the furs for shards, I found a half-burned parchment peeking out from under the bed.

_Vigilant Heino,_

_Search the southwest Rift for signs of extraordinary entities. Certain reports suggesting something, possibly Daedric in nature, has taken residence in the region._

Great. So my house had been torn to apart in a Daedra attack. Excellent, just the news I wanted to hear! I dropped the letter right out the front door to drop unceremoniously on the dirt, and when my hand glanced over a jagged marring in the wooden frame on my way back inside, I assumed it was just another battle scar my poor home had gotten during the tussle. I didn’t even look to see the little carving for what it was: a diamond, with two interlocking circles over top of it.

For hours, I combed through my shack, tossing out the wreckage of ruined doors and shattered glass, taking inventory of what little bits had been lost or stolen. I’d thought my butterfly was the worst of it, until, just out of curiosity, I opened the drawer of my little side table.

My clothes were a jumble, but seemingly unharmed… but what had been nested beneath them was missing. Anxious hands dug through the my meager possessions, throwing clothes to the floor as terror turned my stomach and the taste of bile rose in my throat.

I could picture it clearly, where it was meant to be at the bottom of the wooden drawer. The thick leather, with a long scratch along the back cover from when Olev had accidentally sat on it in full armor; the thick parchment pages, spattered with ink and droplets of various potions; the torn edges, burn marks, bends and creases; the documentation of the trials and pains I’d gone through since coming to Skyrim. My journal for Brother was gone.


	30. Thrynn's Story, Part One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thrynn has done a lot in his life, from mutiny to larceny, thievery and highway robbery, but he never expected to fall in love. But as long as all things have consequences, so too does falling for the cursed sister of the Dragonborn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Flashback chapter!! Were you hoping that the story would progress any time soon? Well, then you're gonna hate that THIS SHIT IS A TWO-PARTER!! I do what I want.
> 
> Things that I wanted include: time jumping all over the damn place, sex scenes, awkward relationships, and ignoring the conflict at hand. That said, I don't have much experience when it comes to naughty scenes. I hope it's not too awkward, but I really did want to try it. I'm challenging myself, and we'll see if it pays off, or if it's just uncomfortable for everyone.
> 
> Other things to note: Quartermaster is used in the pirate sense, i.e., second-in-command of the ship. I thought it was a fitting title for the second-in-command of the thieves guild. Also, like I said, this is a two-parter. I know there was a lot I could have done to shorten it, but honestly... I really didn't want to. But I couldn't make it all one chapter because, while all my chapters tend to be in the 13-14 page neighborhood, this was shaping up to be over 30 pages, and I decided... that was just a bit too much. And, finally, I wanted to point out that this is a pretty sappy chapter. Lots of love and feelings and stuff. Be ready for it.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy!

### Chapter Thirty One

_27th of First Seed_  
 _Dear Big Brother,_

_Besides, how unfair would it be of me to judge you for being in the guild when here I am, living among them and helping them myself?_

“Alright, I’ve had enough!” Cynric cried, pounding his tankard on the table in front of him and sending everyone else’s drinks splashing over the rims of their mugs. “How long are we all just going to sit and ignore this? Pretending it’s not happening? I’m not the only one who sees this, right?”

No one asked what he was talking about. They all saw just what he saw, that glaringly nonsensical scene in front of them. Sitting at the table across the Flagon, a familiar face and the newest recruit shared a chair. Thrynn sat with Brina on his lap, his muscled arms looping around her to hold his hand of cards just in front of her chest. Between him in his leathers and blood-colored warpaint, and her in her pale pink dress and pile of messy curls and uncertain little smile, they couldn’t look more wrong for each other.

She couldn’t even hold up a poker face! She gnawed on her lower lip anxiously as she looked down at the cards while the former bandit behind her kept his expression stoic and cold.

“We can all agree that this is more than a bit disturbing, right?” Cynric continued. 

“Are you jealous?” Rune chuckled.

“Jealous? I wouldn’t go near her! Are you crazy? She may be all sweet and cute, but there’s a whole mess with her I wouldn’t touch. Her brother, to name just one of the many dangerous parts of her. I’m just saying, she’s got to know he’s been with more deer than women, right? Is anyone going to tell her? And is someone going to sit him down and explain to him the differences between women and the animals he fucked living in the wilderness? They’re both in way over their heads.”

“I don’t think you know what being a bandit is like,” Rune ventured. “But I see what you’re saying. She’s new to this life. Why did she go straight to the man with the most violent history here?”

Across the tavern, the skinny little Imperial girl let out a surprised squeak as Thrynn placed his hand on the table. Apparently, he’d cheated so smoothly that not even she had caught when he made the sleight of hand. She twisted on his lap to face him, planting a congratulatory kiss on his cheek, and he responded by placing a calloused hand at the nape of her neck to tangle fingertips in her thick black curls. Even from this far away, it was impossible to mistake the smirk on his face, just a shade more satisfied than they’d ever seen it.

Cynric murmured something into his tankard, but the only word that could be made out by his guildmates was, “Disgusting.”

“You’ve got to be jealous.”

Again, the Breton shook his head firmly. “No. It just doesn’t make any damn sense.”

“It’s plain to see, though,” Brynjolf said, speaking for the first time since Cynric had brought the matter up. “Thrynn may be playing it cool, but he’s got it bad for the lass. The way he looks at her, the way he’s always aware of where she is, whether she’s out in the streets or in the cistern. He’s always around when she’s doing alchemy. Needless to say he enjoys the view of her bending over the table. When she first got here, he convinced Delvin to weasel in on any conversation I tried to make with her, professional or not.”

“He didn’t want you moving in on her?” Rune asked, laughing aloud. “It wouldn’t have been uncalled for, considering your reputation for liking other men’s women, but it isn’t like Thrynn to approach competition in such a roundabout way. He was really putting thought into not looking like a common thug, wasn’t he?”

“Weird thing about the girl,” Cynric said, pointing to the giggling little thing sipping from Thrynn’s mug and laughing some private joke into his ear, “I don’t think she’d be all that put off by it. He beat the ever-living shit out of that courier that conned her, and she was all over him the whole night after.”

Rune nodded. “Yeah, but that was also the night she got wasted and stole Sapphire’s leathers. Ended up on the temple roof, remember? She was…”

“Impaired,” Brynjolf suggested, and the table nodded around him. “It doesn’t really count.”

“Point is, him being a thug hasn’t put her off yet,” Cynric said.

Rune set his mug down with a hollow _clop_ , waving to Vikel for another round as he said, “We’ve all heard the way she talks about Zeno. Worships the man. And he’s the most dangerous man I think I’ve ever met. I can see how she can easily look past a person’s violent nature, or bloody past.”

Thrynn’s hand ran from the back of her neck to her shoulder, stopping chastely there, and with a gentle push he bid her to stand so that he could fetch more ale for them.

“Ugh, someone needs to tell them to just fuck and get it over with. All this sappy courtship is making me sick,” Vex complained, dropping into the empty seat between Brynjolf and Rune.

“I have a feeling that wouldn’t be the end of it,” Brynjolf chuckled. “Hate to break it to you, but this is what love looks like. It’s not the sort of thing that gets out of your system so easily.”

 

_Nineteenth of Rain’s Hand_  
 _Dear Big Brother,_

_Please don’t kill Thrynn. Please, please, please don’t kill Thrynn_

 

Victory rang in their laughter well into the night. The band of thieves were returning from a successful heist in Ivarstead and oh, would they have a story to tell when they returned to Riften! For now, they were camped between the towns for the night, their wagon full of ill-gotten goods pulled off the road to where they’d set up their campfire. Brina sat beside him as they talked through most of the night, and when Rune and Cynric decided to turn in for the night, she scooted a little closer on the cold earth, pressing against him to stave off the bite to the breeze that sighed through the trees.

Thrynn didn’t mind being on watch while his guildmates slept. In his days as a bandit, he’d spent many nights on duty, and savored the silence. And, although Thrynn was certainly utilized by the guild for his brawn rather than his brain, he was not without a very personal philosophical side. Some nights, nothing felt better than trading sleep for hours of introspection and private thought.

Sharing the peaceful atmosphere with her felt right. The dying fire bathed the alchemist in a warm orange glow and made her mane of dark hair dance with every flicker. If she noticed when he set a hand down on her thigh, she said nothing, and she was happy to share stories of their pasts, their perspectives on the present, their feelings about the guild and Riften.

“It’s more like a family than any of the bandit clans I’ve ever run with,” Thrynn told her, his hand drawing a pattern idly on her leg. “Sure, we’ve been on rough times, but it’s not as bad as lean years as a bandit, when everyone’s starving and freezing in the middle of the countryside, looking for any reason to turn on each other just to take out the frustration. No matter how bad our luck is, in the guild, there’s never the feeling that any minute it’s every man for himself. We’re never alone, and if we’re starving, we’re starving together.”

“And when we feast?” Brina asked with a wry smile.

“I’ll tell you when I see it.”

“I don’t know, it’s not so bad,” whispered the girl beside him. “Better than what I had before joining. I actually sleep indoors now! _And_ I have a _bed!_ It’s wonderful!”

“Not tonight,” Thrynn pointed out, indicating their canopy of stars and waving auroras through the thin veil of leaves overhead.

Rather than follow his gaze upward, Thrynn felt her dark eyes still locked on him. “Still not so bad. I’m not alone.”

That was a fate not even Thrynn had been faced with. Even when he rebelled against Garthek, he had about half the clan backing him up. And when he left that life behind, he had a whole guild happy to have him. That she, innocent and gentle and kind, had ever been alone when he, a highwayman with violent streak, always could boast allies and connections, seemed a despicable irony.

“No,” he whispered hoarsely. “You’re not.” Weeks of overthinking and wondering, of holding back impulses and biting back confessions, all led him here, and he no longer questioned his overwhelming need to lock her body against his. Giving in to every fantasy he’d entertained, every desired he’d silently pushed away, Thrynn’s muscled arms wound around her slender form and pressed her back to the ground. Lips found home on hers; to his infinite relief, she moved with him, falling back and pulling him along by his broad shoulders, her mouth opening for him welcomingly.

Thrynn bedded his share of wenches in the past, of course. When he was a bandit, he had all the women he could want! But the sort of girls who went flocking to dangerous thugs were nothing like her. He would be careful with her, he would cherish her.

His tongue explored her mouth wantonly for many minutes while his hands roamed her skinny body over the top of her dress. The only thing more surprising than how easy and natural this felt, like he’d laid with her a hundred times before, was how sweet she tasted with the lingering flavor of mead on her breath. All in all, Thrynn could not remember any experience with a woman being as satisfying as this was proving to be already.

Maybe it was the mead, or their recent victory, but falling into one another was remarkably easy. Thrynn clutched one of her small breasts while his other hand dipped down to hold her hip, and she only smiled into his lips in approval.

Maybe he wasn’t the only one who’d been imagining this for weeks. Her hands wove into his hair, pulling it gently, and her tongue, after just the briefest pause of surprise, reciprocated his ministrations.

Before long, Thrynn’s skin felt fiery hot, his chest bursting. He pulled her back up, bringing her onto his lap to straddle him. Yes, this had been a particular favorite fantasy of his, when they relaxed in the Ragged Flagon and she sat on his lap so chastely. This was anything but chaste, with her skirt riding high over her hips, pelvis set across his straining leathers. Their kiss deepened in intensity, only pausing when he thought he heard her whimper for breath. And damn, did that gasp of air make him harden all the more—he wanted to hear her make more sounds like that! He wanted to make her gasp and sigh. He wanted to make her cry out.

But not tonight. Not now. As it was, Thrynn was suppressing moans and sordid promises in fear that any moment, their fellow thieves sprawled out sleeping just feet away would awaken and discover their little affair. Nothing would ruin this moment as perfectly as their crowing and heckling. It might even ruin his chances with the girl forever.

Not a sound or the slightest change in their steady breathes indicated that either of their companions were the least bit aware of the lewd goings-on just across camp. Thrynn let his hands languidly slide up her legs, under the rumpled pool of her skirt and up to her tight-fitting smalls. Waiting for her to recoil, to tell him to stop any moment, the thief held his breath as his fingertips slid across the smooth fabric, feeling her every intimate curve and committing the sensual landscape to memory.

Really? Neither Cynric nor Rune were waking up, and she wasn’t telling him to stop? This was working out far better than he’d ever dared to hope! Testing his limits even further, Thrynn’s finger slid through one of the leg holes of her smalls, pressing against the soft flesh hungrily and stroking her. Gods, she was just as excited as he was!

One finger slid inside of her, drawing a sharp inhale from his partner, but nothing loud enough to disturb the sleepers. Thrynn let his fingertip graze over her, in and out and to the front, then back again, reveling in the sweet wetness that awaited him. Lifting her briefly, he made short work of her smalls and hastily unclasped the fastenings of his leathers to bring their flesh together.

Something was whispered between them, words lost to the passion of the moment and their pulses pounding in their ears, something like, “Are you sure?” and “I was worried you didn’t feel the same!”

His mouth crashed hers with a need that surprised even himself. And, adjusting her on his hips, he slid himself slowly inward. Her breath in his mouth hitched at the sudden penetration, but he guided her up and down with his hands on her waist, lifting and lowering her at an easy pace so as not to be discovered.

Back home in Riften, he would find a quiet, private place and do everything he so craved. None of this whispered, slow, sneaky bullshit. Hours of foreplay if she wanted, she could have it all. He’d cover the bed in gold and diamonds if she wanted.

Thrynn guided Brina for several minutes, delighting in the view of her bouncing up and down on his lap and the sensation of her flesh on his, over and over in a deliciously agonizing climb toward completion. He gasped between their lips, “Hush,” and rolled them both over, coming to rest between her legs. Thrusting to match their earlier pace, he watched her face in the dim glow of embers as she bit her lip demurely to hold back moans. When he was sure that she wouldn’t make any surprised sounds, he sped up carefully, warm brown eyes twinkling wickedly at her every lick of her lips or purse of her mouth.

Faster, but oh-so-carefully, with just a sliver of his attention on the steady breathing of their companions. There would have been some explaining that could have been done back when she was on his lap, but this position, her legs out wide and held to the ground by his hands, was about as incriminating as it got.

Her expression changed tellingly, her eyes clamping shut in concentration to keep from being discovered with an orgasmic cry. Once more he covered her mouth with his own as he made the last few thrusts count, and felt her come undone beneath him with a muffled whimper into his mouth. Following close behind, Thrynn sighed against her as he pulled away, eyes dancing mischievously over her flushed face.

It was with her back on his lap, head against his solid shoulder and sleeping soundly, that he spent the rest of his shift on watch. 

It was the last thing he’d counted on, when he spared her life and gave her instructions to Riverwood. Never did he expect to see the woman again, and certainly he’d never expected to be guildmates with her, to fall in love with her, or to bed her. At first, seeing her again felt like he was being vindicated for his unorthodox practices as a bandit. But that sense of justification evolved swiftly, the more he realized that he wasn’t just glad that he’d saved her life, but that he was glad that he’d saved _her_ life, this strange girl with such bad luck to make the guild’s curse look like a laughable misadventure. The smile on her face, the sparkle in her eyes, her complete inability to hold a straight face in a card game, they were all things he’d have lost if he had let her wander into the camp as she’d been so determined to do. It wasn’t just that he had the satisfaction of saving a life. He had the satisfaction of holding that life in his arms, of watching her ass while she made potions just across from his bed, of drinking mead with her and hoping, every night, that the opportunity would arise to tell her what he’d been thinking all this time…

It was worth it. If he hadn’t been sure before whether or not having a soft heart and a streak of mercy for women would pay off, now he knew. She was his reward for holding onto his uncommon moral code, even after his fallout with Garthek.

 

_29th of Rain’s Hand,_  
 _Dear Big Brother,_

_I forgot what it was like to have an older brother. I wish it was you._

 

Hours fell away as if he’d been asleep, like it was all just some dream. Thrynn faced his share of hardships and struggles throughout his life, surely, had dealt and suffered plenty of pain. His wounds healed eventually, sometimes leaving faint scars but mostly disappearing with the passage of time. And he knew betrayal, both as one who’d been slighted and the one to call mutiny.

So why was this one so much worse? She was just a girl, he told himself, and not one worth missing!

Each swing of his sword let just an ounce of tension out from his tightly corded muscles, tension that returned the instant he remembered the way her eyes smiled or how she felt in his arms. No matter how much he battered the poor dummy, littering the floor with bits of straw and burlap and wood, he could find no relief from the constant tightness in his chest or the rattling sensation in his heart.

His routine grew more and more elaborate the as his frustration turned to desperation. Pointless chopping gave way to timed maneuvers with his imaginary opponent, precise strikes and measured parries, side-steps and blocks. None of it drowned out her voice ringing in his ears.

How could the gentlest, most innocent young woman to ever step foot in their cistern be a traitor? It didn’t add up! Brynjolf, an expert of perception, had been remarkably wrong about her, as well as everyone else in the whole guild! How could everyone have been so fooled? Was she such a genius that she could play such a fool, such a sweet, naïve little fool for weeks on end without anyone in the guild seeing even a glimpse of who she really was? It seemed impossible that every silly little mistake she made, every embarrassing pratfall or inexperienced oversight had been orchestrated. If she’d been playing a game the whole time, she had played it better than a Daedra in disguise.

Of all the moments someone would have seen through her, Thrynn had the most. The intimate moments they hid, the quiet glances in the dark, the nights she spent sitting in his lap placing his bets for him at cards, how could he have been oblivious through all of that? How could he have mistook her smiles, or the lilting whispers in his ears, for something… real?

Betrayed. Played. He felt like a piece in her game, a fool. He’d fallen in love with the bitch, damn it, he’d fallen for Karliah’s lying, traitorous little whore!

So why did he boil with rage when he heard whispers in the Ragged Flagon about her? Every mention of her name made Thrynn want to punch out teeth or break a nose. Every time anyone else dared to say, “Good riddance,” (and that was a phrase only used if being particularly well-mannered about it) Thrynn’s fists clenched in rage, his instinctive need to defend her always drawing so dangerously near to its breaking point.

At least he hadn’t been present when the guild leader returned from Snow Veil Sanctum, Thrynn reminded himself, stabbing the hapless dummy for what must have been the dozenth time in a matter of minutes. Being loyal to the guild first and foremost wouldn’t have changed the fact that he’d tear anyone to pieces for laying a hand on his girl, even if she was a lying, deceitful cunt, even if everything between them had just been part of her ploy! He hated her for using him, but damn it, she was _his_!

At least, he wished she was. But not anymore. He wished, more than anything else, that he just hadn’t met the bitch at all.

“Thrynn? Lad, what is the matter with you?” It was only when that melodic voice shook him free of his trance that Thrynn realized the dummy was in shreds, his honey-brown hair was soaked in sweat, and the paint on his face had melted and sweated away into streaks of red down his cheeks. “You’ve been in here for hours,” Brynjolf continued, keeping a cautious distance from the maddened bandit. “You haven’t been eating, hardly sleeping…”

The quartermaster had a way of seeing through everyone, drawing conclusions that added up to distressingly accurate pictures. Hiding anything from the guild’s second-in-command was as fruitless as trying to force a master lock with brute strength.

“I’m fine,”Thrynn answered gruffly, wiping some sweat from his palms and fixing his grip on his sword. “Just getting practice in while I’m not on a job.”

“I’m not going to send you on anything as long as you’re this on edge,” Brynjolf shot back sternly. “A sleep-deprived, famished bandit half-soaked in ale? I don’t want to see you like this, and I certainly don’t want to see you make a dead man of yourself on a job.”

Thrynn slid his sword back into its scabbard at his hip, shaking a hand through his long golden-brown hair sheepishly while letting only a sliver of that shame manifest on his face.

“Is this the lass?” Brynjolf asked, lowering his voice to nearly a whisper.

“She betrayed the guild and got everything she deserved. She’s not worth dirt to bury her sorry hide,” Thrynn hissed.

The second-in-command gave a solemn nod as he moved to place a firm hand on the former bandit’s shoulder. “She was just a girl. They’re common as slaughterfish, and twice as much trouble. Especially that one. Take my advice: just let her go. The anger, the hatred, and anything you may have felt for her. She’s gone.”

“I know. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“You sure?” Brynjolf asked leadingly. “I know you had a bit of a crush on the girl.” The deliberate understatement made Thrynn grimace, but Brynjolf did not relent, adding, “But we didn’t mean anything to her. None of us.”

“Really? Do you really believe what Mercer said? That she fooled all of us? That she had even you perfectly wound around her finger? When I think back on… on when I was with her… I can’t remember even the slightest flicker of malice on her face. I can’t think of anything, save for Mercer’s own word, to make me think she was a liar.”

“And you’re letting it drive you insane,” concluded Brynjolf. “You just didn’t know her as well as you think you did. You may have played some cards with her in the Flagon—“

“We were lovers, Brynjolf,” Thrynn spat. “If everything else was fake…”

“Please tell me you’re not this upset because you think she faked it in bed.” After catching Thrynn’s fist twitch, the bandit no doubt considering the course between his knuckles and the quartermaster’s nose, Brynjolf continued calmly, “I know, you’ve got plenty of reason to be hurt. Didn’t realize the two of you were that serious. I thought it was just some drunken flirting in the Flagon.”

Heaving a frustrated sigh through his nose, Thrynn answered, “It was just once. The night before she left. But it would have been more, if I’d gotten the chance. I wouldn’t have let go of her.”

“You’d rather her charade go on forever?”

Thrynn shook his head in defeat.

“Listen, lad, you’ll get over her in due time. But you can’t be dwelling on it. She didn’t love you back.”

“I never said I—“

“You can’t fool me. I saw it in your eyes weeks ago. But she’s gone. It’s over. And you need to get yourself out of this rut and back into action. Nothing will clear your mind as well as work, but I need you to be ready. Clean yourself up, get some food in you, and go to sleep. I’ll have a job lined up for you in the morning.”

A long breath hissed through Thrynn’s teeth as he closed his eyes and nodded. He had to move on, to forget about her smiling black eyes and how her slender waist felt beneath his hands, or the little squeaks she made when trying to hold her moans the night they made love, trying so hard to stay quiet so their companions wouldn’t hear. He wished she would have been loud. He wished he could have made the most of it, savored it, if it was his only chance to have her.

Thrynn shook his head roughly, as though to dislodge the thoughts festering in his imagination. She was gone.

Good riddance, lying bitch. Common as a slaughterfish, and twice as much trouble.

 

_Eighth of Second Seed_  
 _Dear Big Brother,_

_I thought weather was supposed to improve in the springtime! It’s a good thing it never got this bad when I was fleeing Whiterun in the winter, or I never would have made it! The storm has taken a turn for the worst, and the rising warmth of the atmosphere is meaning that these huge and growing snows on the mountains and hills are coming down violently. Apparently, many of the main roads have been covered by avalanches, and one would be a fool to try going even on the safest routes with hypothermia and death a thousand other ways too real a threat._

 

Kynvind. She was from Windhelm, a new recruit. Pale gold hair, bright blue eyes, sensuously curved body, the sort of Nord girl the bards sang about. She had too much pride to sit in anyone’s lap, and didn’t care for card games, but she could play a lute and sing a proper note, and knew how to use any old object on hand to make a lockpick.

Soup spoon? Lockpick. Dagger? Lockpick. Shoelace? Lockpick. It wasn’t very functional out in the wilds of Riften, but it made for a cute parlor trick, and she was always up for a challenge.

No jobs that involved muscle, that was her stipulation. Anything that even had the potential to escalate into a fight, she either refused outright, or insisted on having someone willing to do the dirty work along with her. More often than not, that’d been falling on Thrynn. If there was one thing Kyn would not abide, it was for her crimes to have victims. In ways, that made her noble, and reminded her of the girl Brina had pretended to be. In other ways, the whole holier-than-thou act made him want to drop her down a well.

Was it the way her leathers fit her, just a bit too tight? Was it her stoic professionalism on the job, contrasting with her defiant self-righteousness in the Flagon? Was it the way she flirted like she knew she was in control, like she was granting Thrynn a favor by expressing her interest and seeking, no, _expecting_ interest in return? Was it the fact that she looked and acted nothing like the last woman he’d been with, the one who still made him sick to think about?

Whatever it was, it worked, and for all her annoying opinions, ideas, and morals, Thrynn gave in.

Wiping a hand across his face, Rune stepped out of the training room only to see, just a few feet away on Thrynn’s bed, on the path between himself and, well, anywhere else at all, the pair was enjoying one another’s company again. Why did they even bother putting a blanket over themselves? It wasn’t as if they had any privacy, or were being the least bit discreet.

On second thought, he could probably train for a while longer, Rune decided, turning on his heel and retreating back into the adjacent chamber. Better to get a bit more practice in than have to walk past _that_.

In the Flagon, cards were slid beneath the tables and loaded dice rolled, drinks were splashed and passed around, and conversations varied between low whispers and indignant shouting matches.

Heavily dropping into a chair beside Delvin and Brynjolf, another one of the newer recruits groaned into the table.

“What’s the matter lad?” Brynjolf asked lightheartedly. With his feet crossed on the tabletop and a pint or two of ale already in his belly, the quartermaster looked like he’d finally begun to relax from all his guild responsibilities for the night.

“The problem is that my bed is right by Thrynn’s, and instead of sleeping, I’ve been listening to what sounds like a couple of badgers going at it three feet away.”

If Vex could have rolled her eyes any more dramatically, they would have rolled right out of her pearl white face. “Just throw a boot at them.”

“I don’t want to get near!” Garthar argued. “It sounds like he’s killing the girl, or the other way round! And I certainly don’t want to be the one to find out!”

“Ugh. Fine. Vex, tell them to keep it down,” Brynjolf said, waving it off.

“No! Absolutely not! You deal with them. This sort of shit is your job.”

“And, as I recall, you said that you’d rather he just get straight to the sex, rather than torture everyone with watching him try to flirt,” Delvin chuckled. “Well, you got your wish!”

Through a sneer that could turn a man to ice, Vex snapped, “That was before!”

“What’s everyone fighting about?” a lilting voice asked from the hall leading into the cistern. Wearing a different outfit than she’d been wearing an hour ago, Kynvind sat herself at the table with the others. Only then did she bother to tie the laces at the top of her blouse.

Following after her, Thrynn went straight to the bar to get an ale from Vekel, redressed in his same guild leathers. Never even glancing Kyn’s way, with no indication that he’d left to do anything more than get some fresh air, he joined the card game already in progress across the tavern.

Despite her earlier protests against getting involved, Vex’s mouth was the first to open, a stream of sharp insults right behind her tongue when—

Eyes went wide, and at once, Brynjolf, Delvin, and Vex stood from the table, knocking back chairs in their urgency.

Coming up from the Ratway entrance, two dark figured approached, one holding a book tightly directly in front of her, like a shield.

“You’d better have a damn good reason showing your treacherous faces here,” Brynjolf warned, drawing his sword.

The whole Flagon went dead silent, save for the whisper of daggers and swords slipping from sheathes all around.

With a thrust of the book in front of her, an emphatic, desperate plea in her eyes, the Dunmer lady begged, “Please, lower your weapons so we can speak. I have proof that you've all been misled!”

Vex showed no sign of doing any such thing, and even Delvin had trouble lowering his dagger. It was Brynjolf who sheathed his blade first, but it was not without a fair amount of suspicion in his eyes. He left his hand at the pommel, ready and waiting should his trust be ill-placed.

He twitched his head in the direction of the cistern, indicating that whatever was about to go down wouldn’t be out in the open Flagon. Delvin and Vex positioned themselves on either side of the interlopers and Brynjolf led the way, and as they departed, every eye was on them. A few particularly daring thieves followed behind, Kyn included.

Nearly at the door, she turned to see if Thrynn would follow. His back was turned to her, and he was still seated at the now-empty table, facing the entrance. All she could see was his hands on the edge of the table, clutching it so hard that his knuckles had turned white.

“Aren’t you coming?”

Not turning from the door, Thrynn shook his head. “If she’s with them, I don’t want her to slip in unnoticed. I don’t trust them, and the last thing we need is a mage to ambush us.”

Kynvind nodded, but had already started back for the cistern to watch the scene inside unfold. “Just don’t kill her, alright?”

“…Right.” Would there be anything to gain by sparing her now? This time, would there be any reward for mercy?


	31. Thrynn's Story, Part Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The conclusion of the little Thrynn distraction, in which, after just a bit of time-jumping, we get caught up to the Thieves Guild in the present.

To say he didn’t care for the constant conversation being carried by Brina and the new guy was an understatement. Tomorrow, they would be on the way to Ivarstead for the fur heist, and he’d have her all to himself, but watching her smile into her hands and swap stories made Thrynn’s fists clench around his mug tight enough to bend the cheap metal.

“You spend a lot of time watching them play cards,” Ravyn observed. The Dunmer was friendlier with Brina than with anyone else, a disparity that stuck out poignantly to the retired highwayman.

And Brina, in exchange, was only sweet to him. If she was offended that she was continuously denied official entrance to the guild while Ravyn was allowed in without pause or question, she never showed it.

“I know. I used to play a lot of cards when I lived in the Gray Quarter, but they don’t play the way I was taught,” she admitted with a self-deprecating wince. “I enjoy watching, but I could never play. I can barely keep up, and I can’t seem to figure out how to play without following any of the rules.”

Ravyn leaned forward. So did Thrynn, though he was many feet away, ignored by both participants of the conversation.

“The Gray Quarter? Really? What games did you play?”

“Poker and Vehk-to-Left, by rules of Blacklight and Ald’ruhn for both,” she answered without hesitation. “Here, they play by their own rules. Or, rather, no rules at all. Fun to watch, but too frustrating to play.”

Ravyn let a hard laugh slip, but he quickly hid his mirth behind an expertly-crafted smirk. “B’vek! I’ll give it to you, I wasn’t expecting a n’wah to know any real games! We’ll have to play sometime.”

“Nchow, f’lah!” she remarked back, a proud little smile curling her lips. As Ravyn’s brows lifted and his tongue slid over his lips in an expression Thrynn was increasingly sure he’d need to punch off his face, Brina continued, “How can I trust you in a card game? How do I know you won’t just cheat like everyone else?”

The Dunmer shot Thrynn a look, a knowing look that said that he knew the former bandit had been listening from his perch beside the bar. “Because, believe it or not, there is still honor among thieves. I play fair when it counts,” he said, as much to Brina as to Thrynn.

That assurance alone released all of the tension in his shoulders, making him relax back against the counter. He watched as the two chatted for a while, Brina sharing her experiences living with the Dunmer while Ravyn told her of life in Morrowind, but saw no threats. Sure, Ravyn was intrigued by Brina, but he wasn’t going to move in on her.

Honor among thieves. Brina was his, everyone knew it and respected it, and even if she wasn’t, and whether or not she was in on it, Thrynn would bust heads if anyone touched his girl. Nothing needed to be said, no boundaries needed to be placed. It was plain as a shadowmark right on her forehead.

_Sixteenth of Midyear,_   
_I thought about inserting old scraps and notes I’d taken in the past, but realized I don’t have anything else to pass the time with. Therefore, I will transcribe all of my old notes here, as well as include some extra commentary that I left out before. Oh, and illustrations. Not like I have anything else to do._

 

“Brynjolf!” Cyrnric called over his shoulder, a smile wide on his face. “We need you to settle a bet!”

Across the platform at his desk, Brynjolf chuckled under his breath, but kept his eyes trained on the documents in front of him. “Let me finish with this and—“

“No, it has to be now! Before the knife burns through the target!”

“It’s part of the bet, Cynric! You can’t have him call the bet before the target burns, or you’d obviously win!” Sapphire argued.

“What in Nocturnal’s name are you doing over there?” Brynjolf gaped, finally relenting and standing from his work.

In the target, meant for archery and not whatever display _this_ was, several members clustered around, watching an Elven knife and a sword, both flickering with magical energy, sink deeper and deeper into the thick straw.

In the water beneath the target, several weapons had sunk to the bottom, save for a single iron dagger that was curiously floating on the surface.

“Alright,” Sapphire explained, pointing to the weapons stuck into the target, “Hrolmir has been enchanting weapons, and it got us to thinking—“

If anyone liked interrupting a conversation with a dramatic entrance, it was Zeno.

He didn’t climb down the shaft from the graveyard, no, he _leapt down_ , rolled, and shot to his feet with the determination of a falcon diving in for the kill.

“Oh! Zeno, come here!” Rune bid, waving the thief over. He took a step to away from Thrynn to give the constantly-absent member of the guild a good vantage point to watch the experiment from. “You’re just in time!”

He did walk up to them, directly up to them, but never once so much as glanced at the target that had the rest of the guild so occupied. Instead, as soon as he got close to Thrynn, his whole weight shifted into a single mighty punch to the eye that knocked the surprised former-bandit right off his feet and onto the floor.

The entire guild turned to stare at the assault, and some even were about to pull them apart, until Zeno shouted down to the fallen bandit, “ _You fucked my baby sister?!_ ”

Anyone who was about to help immediately fell back, and the shocked guildmates all at once became a rapt audience. None even took notice when the target behind them burst into flames.

Not one to turn the other cheek, Thrynn kicked back to his feet and gave his knuckles a crack, growling, “What, jealous I beat you to it, sick freak?”

“Probably not the best time to make incest jokes, Thrynn,” Sapphire warned. Then, to Brynjolf, she asked leadingly, “Aren’t you going to…?”

Brynjolf shook his head slowly, his mouth pulled into a tight line. “No, lass… This is personal, and bound to happen for a long time. Best not to get involved. They’ll get it out.”

“Are you sure? I think Zeno’s going to kill him!” Niruin pointed out, still leaning forward, preparing to get between them on a moment’s notice.

The handsome Imperial, however, did not go in for another strike. He turned his dark eyes on the gathered thieves and hissed, “Oh, no, I’m not here to kill _Thrynn_ , even if the piece of shit _deserves_ it. See, I’ve just heard all about what happened back in Rain’s Hand.”

“I see,” Brynjolf somberly said. “About Brina.”

“About how you bastards nearly killed her. Yeah,” Zeno sneered. “So, like I said, I’m not here to kill Thrynn. At least, not yet. I’ve got a very particular order for my hit list, so you can consider this fair warning to try and run. Call it a head start. I’m a nice guy like that. In the meantime,” he said, turning around and drawing his sword, leaving the guild at a loss for words as he stomped his way toward the Flagon, “ _ **where the fuck is Dirge?!**_ You’re at the top of my list, you sister-strangling son of a bitch!!”

“Get involved now?” Sapphire asked.

“Get involved _now_ ,” the guildmaster confirmed, running after the thief-gone-rogue with a small army of guildmates following close behind.

_Thirtieth of Sun’s Height,_

_I mustn’t dwell on the bad. I keep telling myself that. This has been a trial, but of all the places for me to decide to settle, this place is indeed a blessing. In fact, I ought to stop thinking of it like a punishment._

All that remained of the bruise was a yellowish ring around his eye. He set his mug down on one of the new tables, casting a sideways glance to the wreckage of the old tables still tucked away in the corner. Vekel nagged Dirge to just toss the pieces in the Ratway, but someone or another would always insist that the things could be rebuilt.

Good luck to whatever poor fool tried. They had been destroyed when Zeno Shouted them across the Flagon at Dirge.

Kyn was whispering something to Karliah. Anxious, nervous, excited, they buzzed with energy together. Something more important than idle gossip was being passed between the ladies, but no one would dare try and listen in on one of Karliah’s conversations. The Nightingale may have been absent for many years, but her renewed authority was never questioned.

“Looks like something important’s going on,” Vipir observed over the rim of his mug. “They talking about you again, Thrynn? I’m worried about you, ya know. Kyn’s a great and all, but with all this back and forth, love-to-hate stuff, the woman’s gonna snap. You’ll wake up with a knife in stomach one of these days.” He pointed to the women again, indicating the intensity with which they talked. “Look. They’re plotting killing you as we speak.”

“They’re not gonna kill him,” Cyrnric said, passing one of his cards left. “They’re together right now. Wait, aren’t you? I can’t keep track anymore.”

The game continued for several turns, the cards disappearing and reappearing as it suited the players, and at one point, three Vehk cards were stacked together at the center of the table. The first time Brina had witnessed this bastardization of her favorite game, she’s gotten so confused she had to walk away. Thrynn made a point not to smirk at the memory of her lost face, big black eyes searching for some kind of explanation.

“Anyone sitting here?”

Thrynn glanced upward, his eyes locking unintentionally with those of the shapely blonde.

“No,” Niruin said, and he pushed the chair out for her with his foot. “Ravyn, deal her a hand!”

“Actually,” Kynvind said, shaking her head before she’d even gotten situated on her seat, “I didn’t come to play cards. I have some news. While Karliah was on her last job, she happened to catch wind of some interesting information. She’s filling in the folks in charge right now, but I couldn’t keep it to myself!”

Whenever the Dunmer Nightingale and Kynvind were both home from jobs, they were inseparable. They’d become friends instantly and were quickly becoming a combined force to be reckoned with between their feminine wiles and strong ideals.

Eyes already twinkling, Kyn waved her hands above the table, forcing everyone’s cards down. “Listen to this! Who here has heard the rumors going around? The Spirit of the Rift?”

A handful of thieves nodded or shrugged. “Sure, something like that had been mentioned here and there, idle gossip overheard in the market and whatnot,” Cynric said. “What of it?”

“Have you heard all the stories? What they say about her? She’s a strange spirit haunting the western Rift. She heals the sick and wounded who cross her path on the road with magic and potions beyond what any apothecary can create. She’s also performed other miracles and acts of assistance, especially to the Imperial soldiers camping in that end of the forest.” Her smile grew wide. “Her first act was to exorcise the barrow outside Ivarstead. She claimed to be a priest, but passing Vigilants some months later told the town that no such emissary of Stendarr exists.”

Though her guildmates had been thumbing the edges of their cards or tapping fingers and toes impatiently, all movement at the table stopped. Vekel and Tonilia, standing behind the bar, craned their necks to listen.

“That can’t be right,” Cynric argued, brows knitting.

Kyn nodded emphatically. “To pay for her service, she has strange demands. For example, when she exorcised the barrow, a hoard of dozens of bear pelts disappeared from the town.”

“You’ve got to be joking!” said Rune. “They’ve obviously got that much wrong, why should we believe that it’s—?”

“Because,” Kyn explained, lifting a single index finger matter-of-factly, “when you’re in her domain at night, you can hear her singing.”

“Singing?” Cynric repeated.

Barking a single laugh, Niruin clapped a hand to his forehead. “An Alik’r music box! It sounds—“

“Just like a fucking wisp mother!” Sapphire finished.

Half the table burst out laughing, gasping about, “the sheer ridiculousness,” and, “how fucking typical!”

Others sat still, regarding each other with frowns set on their faces.

“So?” Sapphire asked. “Brina’s living in the woods, and has somehow, against all odds, gotten even weirder than she was when she was with us. But unless she’s got something worth stealing, it’s none of our business.”

“She’s part of the guild, Sapphire!” Kyn said firmly, earning herself a glower from the senior member. “And something’s going on! I mean, I’ve never even met the woman, and I know from every story I’ve heard, this just doesn’t add up. Why would she be in the woods, out of civilization? She pops out to heal people, which sounds like her, but she’s always alone. What happened to the companions she had in Windhelm? She’s a member of this guild, and it’s done her wrong; now, we can make it right. She needs help.”

“Who exactly are you to decide that?” Thrynn asked.

“I didn’t,” answered Kyn, straightening in her seat. “Karliah did. She went to look into it herself, and Brina seems to be living in a shack. It’s hidden from the road. Karliah said the feel of the place was forlorn and yearning, and reminded her of when she was hiding after being framed for Gallus’s murder. She put a shadowmark on the outside of the house, but in a really discreet corner, just so no one messes with her, but she thinks we should do more than that. If Brina is in trouble, we have to help.”

Sapphire picked her cards up from the table, and without affording Kynvind so much as a glance, said, “Vex said, if we want Brina back, it’s Brynjolf’s job. He’s be sending us out or going himself if he thought it mattered.”

“That’d why she’s talking to them right now! I’ve been hearing a lot of ‘guild-comes-first’ lately, and Brina is part of the guild!” Kyn exclaimed. “Thrynn—you’re with me on this, right?”

He said nothing. He _could_ say nothing. But thickly calloused hands grabbed at the hand of cards on the table and lifted them back up, as though the conversation had never happened at all.

With a discouraged grumble, Kyn slid her chair out noisily and stomped her way to the Cistern, slamming the door behind her.

As the rest of the thieves took their cards and began to resume the game, it was Rune who broke the stinging silence. “Who would she be hiding from?”

“It’s not our problem,” Thrynn said stiffly, dropping his cards back on the table. “Fold.”

 

_Fifteenth of Last Seed,_   
_The summer has been good to me. I remind myself of this whenever I can. The forest has been bountiful in useful ingredients, and my time has been spent making great progress in my research. Alas, I’ve given away almost every vial and bottle I had. It is with much trepidation that I go to Ivarstead in search of supplies. I pray I am not discovered. I set out tomorrow. Until then, I must keep my fears from getting the best of me._

Whatever had taken them this long to take action, Thrynn didn’t know. But Karliah and Kyn were gearing up for a trip across the Rift, the Dunmer dressed in her Nightingale armor and Kyn wearing a comfortable, casual set of common traveling clothes. They would leave before sunrise, and were determined to go as quickly as they could, to reach her within three days. On foot, it would be a demanding journey, but both women looked confident.

“Thrynn,” Kyn said, kneeling beside Thrynn at the water’s edge. The Cistern was quiet, save for the dripping of water and mutters of the few members who remained awake. “Karliah wants you to come, too. I know you said no before, but… I agree. She knows you. And I think, if she does need help, you’re the person she would accept it from first.”

Karliah and Kyn were attached at the hip, close as friends got. If Brina were still with the guild, Thrynn imagined that she would have made their little team a trio. On a lot of levels, the two current members reminded him greatly of the bumbling little Imperial, with her morals and her wit. Together, the women would be a true force of nature. He almost feared it.

“Why are you doing this, Kyn?”

“Because if she needs us—“

“I mean with me. You keep asking. You ask if I’m alright. You ask if I want to go. You ask if I want to hear what Karliah has figured out. Why?”

Rocking back on the balls of her feet, Kyn answered incredulously, “Because she’s your friend, Thrynn! What, are you still concerned about _us?_ I know when to put my pride aside.”

Thrynn barely contained a snort at the preposterous claim. Her? Put pride aside? It was laughable! He kept his face stoic and clear, though, and gave her a slow nod to continue.

 

“So if that’s why you’re so confused, you can forget it. I’m doing this because Brina needs us, and it would make the whole guild happier to have her around, especially you.” She placed a hand on his shoulder, and gave a little shake. “You _have_ to come. Now get your stuff. We leave in half an hour.”

Despite walking all the way to the West Rift with his currently-ex and her best friend, things were kept shockingly civil. Thrynn was quiet most the time, always looking into the green trees for signs of an ambush of any kind. Was Brina really alright out here? Had she been hurt? Something stung in his chest, something like the rare sensation of guilt.

He should have gone out the minute he heard she was out here, alone in the forest. Why hadn’t he? Why did he need to be coerced by Kyn, or begged by Karliah? Why did he feel a rising sense of dread with every step he took toward the Spirit of the Rift’s domain?

“You never actually explained what you thought she was hiding from,” Thrynn pointed out, chancing a look at Karliah.

The beautiful Dunmer’s jaw set, and her eyes went into the wilderness. “There are two theories. The first, her brother. He’s been looking for her everywhere, and wherever he goes, he’s on the warpath, seeking revenge or retribution or blood… The same time that he started seeking her out, she hid. I do not believe it to be a coincidence.”

Blood ran cold in his veins as Thrynn growled, “He worships her, at least as much as she adores him! Their devotion to each other is—“

“Creepy?” Kyn suggested. “Unnatural? Disconcerting? If I were to call Zeno anything, the last words that would come to mind are ‘stable,’ or ‘sane.’ If something happened between them, or if he’s for whatever reason upset with her like he was with everyone else he’s crossed for the last two months…”

“Shit… I hope he’s as bad at finding people as his sister is.” Thrynn’s eyes hardened and pace quickened. “Why did you wait so long to go find her?”

“At Delvin’s behest, and that leads us to the second theory,” Karliah’s solemn voice whispered. “He’s got friends in places even darker than the Thieves Guild, and the whispers he’s been hearing… they don’t exactly bode well. He told me to wait until he had more information, but it looks like his well has run dry, so we’re going anyway, and perhaps we will find out for ourselves.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Kyn’s pink tongue ran over her lips, a sight that both made Thrynn draw in a lustful breath and choke back the taste of bile. It would never be worth it to fall into bed with her ever again, he reminded himself. Not for all the gold in the world. The sex was good, sure, but not good enough to justify the constant bickering and bitching. And, if Brina came back, he would never feel the need to warm his bed with her again.

“It means,” the Nord girl explained slowly, “that someone from the Dark Brotherhood has been asking around about her whereabouts. And not just any old cutthroat. The Listener himself. The reason it took us so long to get out here is because Delvin was waiting on a response back, trying to figure out what they wanted with her. But the Listener never wrote back.”

A chill ran down Thrynn’s spine at the revelation. “So we don’t know…”

“When I told the other guild leaders, the possibilities were very easily narrowed down,” Karliah admitted. “Since Brina hardly seems like the type to make a contract…” She let the implication fall on Thrynn like a breath of cold wind.

“Who would take out a contract on Brina?” he asked incredulously.

Turning a bend in the road, the trio was met with a fallen tree across the way, a sight which they all steeled themselves at, and the conversation at hand died instantly. The tree looked healthy, and seemed to have been chopped down. It was no accident.

Karliah hopped over the trunk deftly, landing on the other side silently, bow at the ready and arrow knocked. Kyn was behind her in an instant, twin daggers drawn.

Thrynn didn’t have the sneakiness of his companions, but he had a strong sword arm and cunning behind it. While the ladies were looking for the highwaymen no doubt about to ambush, Thrynn was going to them. The darkest point in the treeline was his target, a thicket of brush and rotted wood that might have been natural, but looked just a little too convenient—it was exactly where one of his former profession would sit in wait for hapless travelers. Before the bandits could even hear or notice that the two women were at their ambush-point, a sword stuck ruthlessly into their hiding spot. He didn’t need to see through the cover that his sword had found home. The squish of flesh told him well enough that he’d chosen correctly.

The hiding spot compromised, and one of their own suddenly and violently killed, the other bandit who’d been lying in wait scrambled out of the hiding spot, screaming for an attack.

Across the road, another, more subtle hiding spot burst open, and two bandits emerged with blades bared and slashing wildly.

“Damn it, Thrynn!” Kyn screamed, livid. Once, that had promised at least interesting sex later in the night. Now, it just meant dealing with her tantrum. Ugh. “We could have snuck past! Bloodthirsty barbarian, just sticking your sword into anyone who gets close!”

“They were going to rob us,” Thrynn spat, returning to the road itself where the three surviving bandits were assembling. He spun his sword in a circle so that the hot blood along its length splashed in a long line across the ground.

“They didn’t have to! We could have snuck past, and no one would have to get murdered!”

“It’s self-defense,” Thrynn pointed out.

“Are you joking? These poor fools were never a threat! I feel sorry for them!” Kyn whined. And, to prove her point further, she slid her daggers back in their sleeves on either hip. “I’m not playing along. Murderer.”

She was unbearable, really.

Luckily, Karliah wasn’t adverse to putting a few arrows in people. In fact, as Kyn’s daggers came to rest at her sides, the very same moment and arrow bloomed from one bandit’s eye, accompanied by a spray of red.

And if Kyn wanted to guilt Thrynn, she ought to have known by then that he would not be discouraged. Spinning his blade in his hand, he waltzed right between the two surviving bandits. The first swung a heavy blade of dwarven metal, which Thrynn knocked away with a solid sideways swipe of his own sword. Then, while the idiot was turned around by the force of the parry, Thrynn sent one boot straight out in a hard kick straight for the man’s rib. Leather armor caved with the satisfying snap of bone and the bandit crumbled to the loamy soil with a shriek of pain.

Not to keep his back turned on an opponent for any longer than necessary, Thrynn spun, leading with his sword. Metal struck metal, sending a pang down the length of his arm, but seeing as he’d blocked a mace aimed for his face, it certainly might’ve been worse. For a moment they were locked, but only for as long as it took Thrynn to pull his spare dagger from his belt. He lifted his sword, forcing the bandit’s arms up, and as his posture opened, Thrynn reached the remaining distance with the dagger and planted it squarely in the man’s stomach.

The bandit’s grip faltered, and with a push of his sword against the mace, it went tumbling from his hands. He followed that upward push and let it come full circle, spinning the blade around and up, slicing a clean line from pelvis to heart mere inches from the planted dagger.

Of course, broken ribs weren’t enough to stop a man with his life on the line. But when Thrynn twisted back, thinking he would have to make a killing blow on one remaining bandit, he was surprised to be met with four more attackers charging in.

Reinforcements. The one of the ground now sported an arrow in his skull, and two of the four new arrivals dropped before they could reach the battle proper with arrows sticking from their necks.

Thrynn stepped right on their fallen comrades to meet them, swinging his greeting. One chopped mercilessly with an axe, while the other jabbed with twin daggers much like Kyn did (if she could ever be convinced to use them), but between the two, Thrynn realized instantly that he was hard pressed to parry and counter every relentless strike.

He fell into a broken rhythm, just enough to keep all his limbs attached and lash out with quick, shallow cuts when he could afford to.

A bold move, a long thrust straight ahead for the axe wielder proved worthwhile at first as he impaled the highwayman clean through the chest, but it was not without cost. Arm extended, sword lodged in a man, Thrynn grimaced to watch helplessly as a dagger ran up the length of his arm, slicing deep and tearing away a ribbon of skin.

“Shit!” He was able to tear his sword away just in time to chop sideways into the remaining bandit before that dagger could make it to his throat, and as he pushed into the bandit’s stomach, an arrow sung past his ear and dove into the unfortunate highwayman’s forehead.

“Ugh. What a waste of life,” Kyn mourned.

“Yeah, and it could have been me, too,” hissed Thrynn as he wiped his blade clean on a corpse’s trousers. “I know you have a superiority complex, but do you really get off on standing when your friends are about to get gutted? For fuck’s sake.”

“You didn’t have to start cutting people apart! They didn’t know we were here yet, we could have just snuck right past them!”

Rather than get caught up in the argument, Karliah knelt beside the bodies and began digging through pockets and knapsacks, pocketing wealth they’d no-doubt stolen from travelers themselves. “Let’s not bicker. We should hurry. We’ve still got a long way to go.”

Traveling all day and through most of the night, the group was footsore and frustrated. Even after Thrynn’s legs could hardly carry him another step, a fire building in his gut made stopping to make camp feel like defeat. There was no time to stop! They could sleep later, when they had Brina back! Rest could wait, but Brina couldn’t!

He was unconscious the instant his body hit the bedroll. The moment the sun kissed the horizon, he was awake and dressed, the camp packed and on his back.

Karliah remembered the location of the shack, and could lead them off the road and straight to the small structure tucked away in the thick copse of birch trees. Wordlessly, she pointed to the ground to indicate fresh footprints in the soft soil. Someone else had been here, and very, very recently.

The front door was sturdy and boasted a large lock, but as Kyn knelt down to begin probing the keyhole, she crinkled her nose. “Unlocked.”

It was clearly home to an alchemist. Ingredients filled the shelves and hung from the ceiling. When the door opened, the wave of heavy herbal aromas rolled over them, reminding Thrynn all too clearly of the young woman’s scent as she sat on his lap.

Thrynn started into digging through her things the instant the door swung wide, grumbling, “If she’s still here, we’ll know! I just need to find…!”

He could picture it clearly, the most definitive piece of proof that the Spirit of the Rift was indeed Brina and that she was still living in the shack. The little leather journal, marred and scarred from countless misadventures, her own personal account of her life since coming to Skyrim. If he could find that, he would know she was here. If he could find that, maybe it would tell them who was after her, how to help her, where to hide her, who to kill to liberate her!

Nothing on the shelves, damn it all! With a stream of curses boiling under his breath, Thrynn moved on to the little bedside table and drawer. Dresses, outfits, none of which Thrynn recognized. He rifled through them, seeking the prize that might solve it all—

His head reached the bottom of the drawer, and was met with cracked wood and nothing more.

If he could find something else, maybe he could just know that she was here, that she would come back! Her music box, her satchel, damn it, _anything_! In desperation, Thrynn begam to dig through the straw of her bed. Perhaps something was hidden…!

Over Thrynn’s colorful chorus of expletives, Kyn said, “Do you think she’s coming back?”

“Not if she knows she’s being hunted,” whispered Karliah. “That must be why even her most precious possessions are gone. She’s fled.”

“We may have bigger concerns.” Kyn squeaked, her eyes wide on the window.

Karliah grabbed the girl by the arm and yanked her down, and silently, the three thieves listened intently, keeping low and out of sight to any who might look through the window.

“What business do you have here? This house is under investigation by the Thalmor, an investigation which your presence sorely interferes with!” Thrynn peeked over the windowsill to see that the woman talking was indeed an Altmer woman dressed in the long black robes of a Thalmor agent. She snapped her fingers, and immediately her subordinates drew their weapons menacingly. Zenotha rumbled dangerously, “I highly recommend you vacate the premises until our investigation is done.”

Standing just a few yards away, with sour expressions and rigid postures, a squadron of men, dressed in bluish-gray robes with golden mantles reminiscent of Aedric priesthood robes, showed no sign of backing down. “Wherever the Daedra hide, the Vigil of Stendarr will cast them into the light. Be it within or outside your so-called investigation,” their leader hollered. “We seek a powerful force within these woods, and shall not be deterred by Thalmor foolish enough to wander into Stormcloak territory!”

“I see. Very well, as we are at an impasse, it appears I’ve no choice but to exterminate the lot of you,” Zenotha sighed, feigning disappointment.

“We should get out of here!”Kyn said. And she didn’t need to say it twice—the thieves were sneaking out the back door and around the garden at the same time that they heard the window shatter and something explode.

They made camp less than a quarter-mile away, close enough to see when the fires had all died and when the warring factions finally left the scene. Whilst waiting, Thrynn laid back against a log, shaking his head in amazement. “Her brother. The Listener. Thalmor. And the Vigil. How does anyone make so many enemies?”

“We don’t know that they were all there for her, necessarily,” Karliah said. “Though, with her reputation as a spirit, the Vigil would feel the need to get involved. And since her brother is the Dragonborn, and known to have plenty of ill-will between himself and the Thalmor…” She stopped short. “It certainly does seem she has her hands full.”

“So what will we do?” Kyn asked. She dropped her head onto Karliah’s shoulder, and kept her eyes off of Thrynn.

For a few minutes, Karliah was silent. Then, with a stiff inward breath, she said, “Even if she is already gone, we will leave our mark. For any who come looking for her, let them know that Brina is not alone. If they go after her, they make enemies of every thief in Skyrim. And as for the Dark Brotherhood… Delvin insisted that, as per our treaty, we would be obligated to hand over anyone with a contract on them. I say, damn any treaty that voids our members of protection for nothing in return! The Dark Brotherhood is weak as it’s ever been since its conception, and if they want Brina, they have to go through us. And of all the enemies to make, the ones who know how to get into your lair, the secret entrance, and every nook and cranny of your only Sanctuary is dismally unwise.”

The sounds of battle died and, through the trees, the thieves could see Zenotha and one other Thalmor limp toward the west. Careful to avoid coming in contact with any remaining combatants, the group was met by a chilling sight upon returning to the shack: the whole building was a mess, the doors blasted away and window shattered. Peeking in through the open hole where a door used to be, the inside was mostly intact. In a jar on the shelf, a butterfly fluttered obliviously in happy little circles.

Taking a dagger to the shattered doorframe, Karliah placed a new shadowmark where everyone could see: Protected.

“If Brina does return to this place, she will know that she has a home still among us, and we will protect her,” Karliah said. She slid the dagger back into her sheath and flashed a small smile between ash-gray lips. “And if any others come here looking for her, let them know who else they are dealing with.”

“Will we keep looking?” Thrynn asked through the lump gathering in his throat.

Looking up at the big Nord, with his mane of honey-brown hair and lines of blood-red warpaint, Karliah’s periwinkle eyes grew soft. “We will do everything we can.”


	32. In Which She Meets a Werewolf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With nowhere else to go, Brina goes where people need help. But these are going to be her most difficult patients yet, and the task is far beyond anything she's attempted on her own before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This next little adventure is going to be tough for me, so I apologize in advance. I've been planning this for a while, but I've got to say, I did this quest line once, when the game first came out three years ago. Please bear with me~~

### Chapter Thirty One

A diamond, with two interlocking circles. When I finally spotted it, the armful of mushrooms I’d been carrying into my doorless, windowless shack fell to the ground. I followed them in short order.

How long had it been there? How long had I been oblivious to it? I’d been back from Ivarstead nearly a week now. Was it there before I left? I looked over the carving, and found that while the cuts were somewhat new, there had been just enough time for the edges to soften. It wasn’t a fresh mark.

What had happened?! Had Mercer forgiven me? Did he finally find out that what I’d said before was true, that I had nothing to do with any treason or plots? I wanted to run to Riften and give the scary old man a kiss! I wasn’t part of the guild, but that was no different than before. They were looking out for me. They knew I was here!

_They knew I was here._

The realization hit me painfully. My hiding spot was compromised. Sure, lots of people had seen me in these woods before now, but I never gave my name. They had no idea who I actually was. But the Thieves Guild knew all about me, who I was, my brother… If Mercer had forgiven me, perhaps he’d also forgiven Brother. If he was back with the guild, did that mean that he knew where to find me, also?

And, if he didn’t, if he was still exiled from the guild, would I dare return to Riften? No, I’d be too easy to find there! If he ever came back, I’d be right there and…!

And what?

For a moment, I caught myself off-guard. I couldn’t even remember what was so bad about him finding me. He would… he would defeat Alduin. That was good. And the Thalmor would win. But did they have to? They would have the opportunity to win, sure, but no one was going to hand them victory. The scholar made it sound as though their victory was assured, but was that an unbiased fact, or was that Altmer superiority?

As long as I didn’t know for sure, though, how could I doom the world? It was… already doomed, one way or another, technically… But other than that, why did I have any right to make it worse?

A shaking breath escaped me as I looked helplessly up from the ground to the shadowmark.

I had to leave. Where would I go now? I’d been so lucky to find this shack, so now what? Maybe staying still at all was the problem. Just like I could never track Brother down because he was always moving, I couldn’t stay in one spot where my location could be discovered. I had to be one step ahead, never giving anyone the chance to know where I am.

Packing pained me more than I expected. Weighing myself down would do more harm than good, so I resolved myself to leaving behind most of my possessions. I would keep the fur cloak and the tent, but that already was heavy for me. That, combined with my alchemy set, and I would barely be able to carry anything else.

Clothes. A handful of potions. Janan’s music box. My new journal of alchemy notes. Leaving so much behind proved difficult, but I had no other choice.

The whole forest quaked with a booming noise, something between a roar and a howl. My first thought was that it was a dragon, but as the sound went on, I realized it was a chorus of many beasts at once. Maybe this was the daedra that my shack got destroyed over!

Without a second thought, I was out looking for the source of the noise. Maybe knowing that my life was a liability to the whole world made me careless about my safety. Maybe watching two dragons perish before my very eyes made me courageous. Whatever the case was, I didn’t even think to be afraid as I plunged into the woods.

I should have been afraid, I realized too late. In a small clearing in the direction of the ruckus, I found the bodies of seven men in scale armor. More surprising were the weapons littering the ground. Some of them shone brightly, while others featured a copperish tarnish. Silver. Who would walk into battle with an ornamental weapon? Surely they wouldn’t stand a chance against proper steel!

Closer and closer, the scene before me grew more disturbing. Their armor wasn’t torn to bits by swords and axes alone: they were mangled, ripped to shreds, guts spilling freely onto the ground around them.

I couldn’t heal this. Stumbling back, I emptied my stomach behind a tree, but forced my gagging down when, somewhere in the distance, a rumbling sound echoed through the woods and into my ears, shaking my chest with terror.

For a brief instant, I was transported to the northern shore of Dawnstar.

Why did the invisibility potion in my satchel feel so damn slippery? My hands, wet with sweat, could not grip it though my life very well depended on it. My legs went numb as I started to run, tripping and bumping myself on branches and logs, but through the adrenaline rush and fear, I felt none of it. Behind me, the rumbling turned to growls, and the growls to roars, and I was sure, so sure, that any moment I would be torn asunder! In anticipation of the claws that would rip into me, my skin burned hot and my stomach dropped to imagine myself getting gutted by the monsters.

What could I do? The invisibility potion finally made it to my mouth, but I couldn’t taste it over the taste of bile and acid.

With no idea where I was going, and getting deeper and deeper into the unexplored forest, I was far from my home by now, and getting further away—at least, I thought I was, but I was so lost and turned around that I could have been anywhere. When I thought to pause to observe my surroundings, all I could imagine was a blood-covered maw chomping right into me the moment I was stationary.

So I kept running until my veins pumped acid. Somewhere in my bandolier was a potion to regain stamina, but my fingertips felt cold, and couldn’t get the grip to pull the bottle free. A muffling spell whispered at the back of my mind, but as long as my brain was a jumble of internal screams, the knowledge was good as useless.

Wood cracking and snapping behind me spurred me forward. Loud huffs of breath and growls made me entirely forget the way my lungs burned.

Just ahead, the ground split upward, and in the low cliff a small hole presented itself as my only chance of survival.

You might think you’re afraid of the dark, or afraid of spiders, but when it’s between diving through a wall of webs and into a pitch-black cave, or being eaten alive by your greatest phobia, you often find that those other little fears really don’t match up. And, to be fair, the spiders really probably were more afraid of me than I was of them. After all, some invisible ghost just barreled into their home. 

They tapped their legs anxiously on the ground, ticking and hissing, but none moved against me. We just sat on opposite sides of the cave, unwilling but cordial company. The cave itself was actually a nice little den. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that it was relatively flat ground and surprisingly high ceiling, high enough that I wouldn’t need to crouch. I tucked myself in the corner furthest from the entrance, holding my breath as I waited for enough time to pass that I might sneak back out. Maybe they would lose track of me. Maybe they would get bored searching and wander away.

Maybe I would just live out the rest of my miserable life in this spider-pit. Preferable to getting eaten, I thought sullenly.

The cave went ice-cold as a massive shadow eclipsed the opening of the cave. It only got close enough for a thick strand of sticky silk to catch against its snout before it recoiled far from the entrance with a yelp.

What would I do? What magic did I have that could defeat it if it came back? My spells all seemed dismally outmatched when compared to the monstrosity that hunted me! In desperation, I tugged a hunk of canis root out of the cave wall. They say it wards off werebears; maybe it would do well enough on their cousins.

Outside, more rumbling. Maybe voices. I wouldn’t get close enough to find out. But once my pulse stopped pounding so loudly in my ears, I heard, “In there?”

“Uh-huh. Followed her scent after she turned invisible. She slid right in, straight through the webs, like they didn’t bother her at all.”  
“Alright, well, good job. Just stay back, alright? I’ll get her out,” the distant, muffled voice said.

“She looked so scared when she started running. And the smell of fear…” Amazingly, the low, growly voice managed to sound… remorseful. Despite myself, I even felt a pang in my chest from how sincerely distraught the man sounded.

I wasn’t about to be fooled, I reminded myself! I planted my feet and pressed my back closer to the wall for good measure.

“Hey, don’t take it personally. She was just startled, that’s all. Why don’t you just stay back, and I’ll be right out.”

A large Nord ducked into the cave entrance, scanning the cavern for me. As his face turned to me, it was bonked squarely between the eyes by the hunk of canis, and I watched, horrified, as he wasn’t the least bit deterred.

“Brina? I take it that means you’re in here?” Echoing through the cave, the voice hit me a hundred times at once, knocking the breath from my lungs. Of all the voices I would have recognized, his was the last I expected. With sunlight flooding in behind him, I saw the halo of bright golden hair, grown wild and rugged like a true Son of Skyrim.

After several attempts to swallow down the frog in my throat and make sense of what was going on, I somehow managed to choke, “A- _Arvid?!_ ”

Sweet, stupid Arvid.

I was so dumbfounded that I hardly noticed as he pulled me out of the cave like a child. I only became aware of my surroundings again when my formerly-favorite guard set me down on my feet back outside.

Arvid stood behind me. To my left, the big Companion, Farkas, who I’d danced with a lifetime ago under the Gildergreen. To my right, the tough female Companion. She’d helped carry the ale from the Cauldron to the Wind District, and had sat on the steps to Jorrvaskr the night of the party.

My whole body shook so violently that the bottles and vials I my satchel clanged against each other. “What’s… what’s going on…? Did you… did you kill the werewolf that was trying to eat me?” It was something between a question and a sob. 

Farkas lowered his eyes, his lips curling between his teeth and posture slumping.

“You’re perfectly safe,” Arvid said in a low, measured voice, very pointedly ignoring my question. “We came looking for you. Everyone’s been talking about the Spirit of the Rift, capable of healing the sick and performing miracles. I knew it was you, even before I got the journal to prove it.”

“What are you talking about?”

Avid set a warm, comforting hand on my shoulder. Glancing back at him, I was shocked to see what had become of him since I’d left Whiterun. He’d gotten hairier, his beard bushy and his mane long and untamed. His eyes were still their striking cerulean blue, but were set between lids dark like bruises, with black veins radiating from sunken sockets. That very same affliction was present on many of the Companions, including the two present with Arvid. Once upon a time, Arcadia tried to diagnose them, but couldn’t seem to figure out what ailed them.

“We need something equal parts cure and miracle, Brina. I swear, you’ll be hidden, and every Companion will vow to protecting you and hiding you from your brother. Please.”

“Hold on! Wait, why are you even a Companion, Arvid? I thought you were lieutenant, being trained to take over as captain of the guard? What happened?” I asked. I turned to face him, and I could feel the genuine concern in my eyes. After all, if he wasn’t working for the Stormcloak regime, it was a step in the right direction, and being sympathetic to him came much easier when being a traitor was no longer his job.

He straightened a bit taller, showing off his Skyforged steel armor in all its glory. “That’s really not what this is about—“

“If you want my help, you’re going to have to indulge me,” I informed him matter-of-factly. I straightened up a bit myself, though my skinny frame couldn’t carry pride and sternness as well as his broad shoulders could. “And you’ll have to get used to it. I ask questions.”

Eyes locked on mine faltered just a moment, just barely, and I wondered if the poor fool was still in love with me. He’d had plenty of time to get over me, but for every other time I’d left him behind in Whiterun before, his affections never dampened. “The voice. In the basement. It started talking to people again, influencing them. Captain Sinmir was pulled under the creature’s spell. I barely escaped with my life, and managed to talk some sense into him, but even with Farengar putting the Ebony Blade in a magical containment…” He ducked his head, ashamed. “I found that I couldn’t trust anyone in Dragonsreach anymore. I feared for my life, and nightmares of the blade and the woman behind the door kept me awake. I needed a new beginning, and the Companions welcomed me with open arms. Never, even in the most dire of circumstances, would they betray me, and for that, I give them my life.”

I didn’t need to know details to smell _Daedra_ on the brief story he told. And, considering my own run-ins with the denizens of Oblivion, I didn’t blame him one bit for walking away from it. But, again, it might have been my bias against the Stormcloaks that steered my opinion on the matter. “I understand. Well, you look like a good fit for them. I’m happy for you. But I don’t know what you need from me.”

“We need a healer. Something… a few steps beyond just normal, regular healing. I know it’s asking a lot, but if you come with us, we will protect you. Please, I beg of you. Every Companion of Jorrvaskr will be forever in your debt!”

My eyes strayed from Arvid to take in the other Companions. The woman didn’t look exactly impressed, and certainly not as desperate as Farkas. “Why didn’t you go to Arcadia? She’s been wanting to heal the Companions for years.”

Farkas shook his head slowly. “We all wish it were that simple, but a potion alone can’t do it.”

“Not only do they say you’re the best healer in Skyrim, but you’ve got Mara’s blessing,” Arvid said, and I had to keep from snorting. Mara and I were not on good terms, considering how I snubbed her in Dawnstar. I couldn’t imagine that she had a high opinion of me at all. “Also, as it says in your journal… you’re familiar with standing up against Daedra.”

I wished I had another fistful of canis root to throw at him. “Two points of that have me worried. First, how in Oblivion _did_ you get my journal? Second, why does this have to have anything to do with Daedra?” Of course, I healed a centuries-old vampire, which probably meant Molag Bal didn’t care for me; I denied Sanguine; I helped break Vaermina’s staff and end her curse on Dawnstar; I turned down a Daedric lord offering to make me a deal, which, if my memory of the stories serves me correctly, was probably Clavicus Vile; and I was making a habit of curing every disease I crossed, so Peryite surely hated me as well. It really wasn’t as though pissing of Daedric Princes wasn’t all in a day’s work for me.

Arvid ran a hand through his shaggy hair, his charming smile turning embarrassed. “A guard found it…”

“ _Found_ it?” My jaw dropped.

“On the road… outside of Whiterun. It looked like there had been a fight. Seemed like the journal was dropped in the tussle.”

“Well, where is it? I need that back!” I hadn’t felt this close to a panic attack since I’d first learned about the dangers of Brother finding me.

Hands patted the air to calm me down. Arvid forced his straight white smile just a bit wider. “It’s in Jorrvaskr, and it’s safe, I promise. When we get back to Whiterun with a cure, we’ll happily return it to you.”

There was no way to know who or what had had my journal, but I had to take comfort in the fact that the Companions could protect it. In the meantime, there was really no reason for me not to go with Arvid and his new friends. Besides needing my journal back, I couldn’t stay in the Rift any longer anyway. I took a few seconds to think on it, but I already knew what my answer would be. I asked on an inward sigh, “And what’s this about Daedra?”

“We need your help curing a Daedric curse,” Farkas answered, getting straight to the point.

“…Of course you do.” Fine. Whatever. Not like I had anywhere else to be, really. But as my next question came to the tip of my tongue, I felt the weight of it turn my bowels to water. I realized too suddenly that I knew the answer. “What kind of curse?”

Arvid truly looked apologetic. “You, ah… you already saw it.”

“I don’t understand,” I choked. I understood perfectly. My hands were suddenly feeling slick with sweat. In my ears, my pulse was beginning to pound. Survival instincts begged me to break into a run.

“Please, Bri—“

“Arvid, please, please tell me that you’re not going to eat me.”

“What? Why would I ever want to—“

“Promise me!”

“Yeah! I promise, Brina, I will never eat you!” Arvid cried. He waved emphatically at his cohorts. “Neither will they! You have my word!”

Air rushed in and out of my lungs so quickly, I hardly felt like I was breathing at all. Dizzy, with my limbs seemingly detached from my body, I tried to nod my consent, only to wake up a few minutes later on the ground.

Leaning over me, Arvid’s soft eyes looked like menacing as pits into the Void with their dark black rings. “I didn’t realize you were so afrai—“

“Promise!” I begged.

“I—damn it, Brina, I already did! I promise not to eat you! Shor’s bones, _calm down_ , you’re perfectly safe with us!” He fell back on his haunches, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it. You’d dive into a spider-infested pit and approach vampires on the road without a thought, but you run for your life from _Farkas_? The man’s a puppy! I can’t believe you’re so afraid of werewolves.”

“Well, I am!” I gasped, sitting straight up with a jolt. “He’s a puppy with a hundred razor teeth and claws the size of swords and eyes that glow red like an Oblivion Gate!”

“Don’t listen to her, Farkas, you really aren’t that scary,” Arvid assured the black-haired Nord.

“I know… If I knew she would get so scared, I wouldn’t have transformed at all.” Farkas knelt beside me, one hand big as a bear paw coming down slowly, gently on my shoulder. No claws. In fact, his nails were extremely short. He must chew on them, I thought. “We’re not like that. We just want to be cured.”

“I’ll help. I… of course I’ll help. It’s what I do. But please don’t chase me. I thought my heart would burst!” Even then, it thundered incessantly in my chest, making my ribs ache with the constant pounding.

Like a child, Farkas lifted me from the ground with ease, moving me without any warning so that I squeaked in terror at the sudden assertion of his strength. “Do you need anything before we go?” he asked, very gently, and I blushed to think how self-conscious I’d made him.

“No,” I whispered, trying hard not to think about how much power rested in the big strong hand on my shoulder. “You had good timing. I was about to leave anyway.”

With a frown, Arvid bent forward so that he was looking me in the eyes. “What do you mean?”

I explained as we walked, telling them all about how they were not the first to find me, and how I had proof that at least one organization associated with my brother knew where I was. Since I dreaded how Arvid, former lieutenant and guard would feel about my past with the Guild, I hedged the issue by teling them how my brother was a member. “The shadowmark itself isn’t a sign of danger, but that so many people know where I am, and that that knowledge could easily find its way to my brother, means I have to hide elsewhere. I wasn’t sure where to go, but I suppose just going with you makes the decision easier.”

Neither of the other Companions asked any questions, but behind their strong, stoic faces, I could find no traces of where or not they knew of my situation, or the horrible prophecy of the Thalmor scholar. All I knew was that Farkas could hardly look me in the eyes, and the woman, Aela, as she was introduced in passing, barely bothered to look at me at all.

And leave it to Companions to travel at a relentless pace. My left leg could barely support me anymore when they finally announced that they’d be making camp in the mouth of the pass in the shadow of the Throat of the World.

I wasn’t used to keeping company. The camp was quiet and awkward, and I kept my eyes down and my attention on the barely-cooked venison they’d prepared for supper. None of them complained about the bloody meat, but I continuously reminded myself it wasn’t necessarily because they were monsters. Anoriath ate raw meat all the time, and he wasn’t a werebeast, and he certainly never tried to eat me!

Tentatively, I glanced around the fire to ask, “So… what can you tell me about the curse?”

They turned to stone before my very eyes, and for a long time I sat there, staring, waiting for an answer that wouldn’t come. 

“Alright… How about the cure? Do we have any direction? Any ideas?”

Nothing. None would catch my gaze, none would say a word.

“How were any of you expecting me to help if you won’t tell me anything?”

“You already know more than one outside our order should,” Aela snapped, turning on me so suddenly that I could have jumped out of my skin. “You know exactly what you need to, that we’re werewolves and that we need to figure out the cure, and you’ll get no more.”

A flash of indignance had me scowling at the scary werewolf lady, and I for a moment, I didn’t even care that she could kill me a hundred ways in either form. “I get it, I’m not a Companion. But you can’t just drag me along and have me heal something blindly. I want to help, I really do, but I can’t do anything if you keep secrets from me.”

“The Companions have many secrets, but for every one, a reason,” said Aela. “If we indulged them all to every milk-drinking _maiden_ ,” she said the word with enough acidity to tell me exactly what she thought of women outside her family of shield-brethren, “there would _be_ no Companions. If you don’t like it, we’ll leave you behind.”

Dark brows knit over Farkas’s gentle eyes. “Aela, calm down.” Then, he said to me apologetically, “These aren’t secrets we’d tell anyone outside the Circle. And Aela’s been even harder to convince, since she doesn’t think we should be finding a cure at all.”

While my jaw dropped at the revelation, Arvid quickly added in her defense, “She was born and raised to be a Companion! She’s a dedicated hunter and warrior, and for her, it’s not a curse. Imagine if you had the chance to become—I don’t know, an alchemy-and-magic equivalent to a werewolf, able to expand your prowess for your craft beyond limitations of man or mer. Wouldn’t you consider it a blessing, too?”

Why he was taking her side, I didn’t know, but I immediately said, “There is such a thing, it’s called a hagraven; and no, I most certainly would not consider being turned into one of those things a _blessing!_ If you don’t want to be cured, fine, I’ll try to make sure whatever cure I come up with can’t affect you. But for everyone else, if they want my help, I’m going to give it! And that starts with telling me what I need to know!”

Aela scoffed at me and said no more, but to my surprise, both Arvid and Farkas opened up after that.

The Companions were werewolves. And when they died, their souls would be bound to Hircine, and not free to feast in Sovngard. That was where this sudden need to cure the curse after many generations came from: their current Harbinger was getting old and could feel his death approaching, and couldn’t stand the thought of an Eternity in the Hunting Grounds. For some, like Aela, this was not an unwelcome afterlife, but for many others, like Farkas and Arvid, Sovngard was by far preferred. The curse itself was started when a coven of hags bestowed the dark gift on a Companion who sought to make their order stronger. As we talked and the history was finally given to me, I wracked my brain for possible angles to breaking the curse.

We had to end the contract, to break the covenant. We had to destroy what bound the Companions to the Daedric Prince.

The coven was our key, I was sure of it! I just need to figure out how to go about it!

Hours passed. Aela and Farkas went to sleep, but for a long time, Arvid and I stayed up talking. The conversation drifted from the curse, to his life in the Companions, and what had become of Whiterun.

“Everyone is fine,” he assured me with a wistful smile. “Arcadia worries, but no one ever says anything about you, whether or not your brother is in the city. He even came through a few times, and the guards all pretended you didn’t even exist. They’d hardly carry any conversation at all. It was little hilarious, how frustrated he’d get when he’d be standing there, trying to ask some question or another, and the guards would just go back and forth with, ‘no lollygagging,’ or, ‘what is it, Imperial?’ I heard his shout from across the Wind Disctrict, ‘I _know_ I’m Imperial, damn you, will you listen to me?’ I had to hide behind a house so he wouldn’t see me laughing at him!”

I laughed just imagining it. “And what about you? Every time I’ve left you behind… I haven’t ever been particularly kind about it. I’m sorry. But you’ve never had a hard time being loved by people around you. Hero to the people of Whiterun, a respected guard, now one of the most important members of the Companions! You look like you’re doing alright… except for the curse part, of course.”

He nodded, his eyes taking in each of his new friends in turn. “I’ve been through a lot since you left, but it’s all been for the best. I’ve been doing well in the Companions. Kodlak says that it’s no wonder I would have become captain, because he thinks I’m a born leader. Even said I might make a good Harbinger one day! I haven’t told anyone he said that, though. I think Vilkas would make a good Harbinger… but hopefully we won’t need a new one for a long, long time yet. In the few short months I’ve been with them, Kodlak’s become like a father to me.” He nodded to his sleeping friends. “I really have a home with them.”

It was like he was describing what I felt when I joined the Thieves Guild. That sense of belonging, of knowing you had friends, like a family, people to go to who might not understand you, might not always agree with you, but damn it, they _cared_. My face flushed with a jealous heat the more I thought about how lucky Arvid was to have what I could never have again.

“Are you any luckier with the ladies as a Companion?” I dared to ask. I sincerely wanted him to be happy, I really did. Maybe the new faces and close quarters might have helped him find a girl who could love him back, properly.

Even in the dim firelight, the flush across his cheeks was unmistakable. “Yeah,” he said slowly, and despite myself, that burning sensation of envy flared under my skin again. “You know, it’s funny… It seemed at first like she was nothing like you, until we started talking. It’s that dedication that I must have found so attractive about you, because she has it, and… It’s the way a simple skill has become her identity, the core of who she is. She obsesses over mastering her art and being the best. That passion and ambition just drives me wild, you know? And then there’s the way she treats her fellow Companions. Puts them above everyone else in the world. There’s so much fire in her, I’m drawn in.”

“Wow, I’m…” So jealous I don’t have anyone anymore. Miserable that I never will. Disappointed that not even _you_ love me anymore. Truly, completely alone. “…really happy for you, Arvid. Now, here’s the real question: does she love you back?”

Arvid’s eyes sparkled the way they used to sparkle for me. “You can ask her when she wakes up, but I’m fairly certain I can speak for her and say, yes, she definitely loves me back.”

He could have kicked me in the stomach. It sure felt like it. “ _Aela?_ Really? But she’s so…”

“She can come off as really aggressive. It’s just how she expresses herself.”

“Is that why she hates me so much?” I dared to ask. Maybe it wasn’t just me. Maybe she was jealous. Territorial.

But Arvid winced, and slowly shook his furry head. “She hates you because you’re a milk-drinking weakling who wears dresses instead of armor and use magic instead of steel like a ‘proper’ woman. And, to make matters worse, we’re telling you everything that should be kept a dear secret, for you to break a curse that she thinks we’re better off with. It’s… probably best that she doesn’t know about how I feel. For that matter, it’s better if Farkas doesn’t know, either. Just keep it secret, yeah?”

My ears perked up. “Why shouldn’t Farkas know…?”

“He’s not very tactful, and he’d probably let it slip. And he wouldn’t mean to! He seems actually really worried about you. I can tell he’s working really hard to be as un-menacing as possible around you. Poor oaf, I’m sure he feels bad for scaring you.”

“Oh.” That deflated me quick. I glanced over the dying fire at the big man. He slept without a shirt. I didn’t realize men could get so big or hairy, and when I caught him in my peripheral, I kept startling myself by imagining he was a bear. I used to imagine what it would be like to be held in those massive arms, to be married to the big Companion who drank my ale and danced with me. It shamed me to admit that those fantasies were often revisited while I was alone and longing in my shack, forlorn and accepting that I’d never know love again.

“So, where are we going to go?” I asked, turning my blushing face back to the flames.

Arvid stretched out beside me and set his hands under his head. I followed his gaze to the bright blue banners of light shimmering over the stars. “You tell me. Time is of the essence, though, remember, so wherever we go, it has to count.”

Now it was my turn to wince. I would have suggested we go to Jorrvaskr, just so I could meet this Kodlak myself and get more clues to go off of. But if he wanted to get right to it. “The Glenmoril Witches. That’s what they were called, right?”

He pursed his lips and nodded.

“We need to end your bond with them. Sever your ties. But we need to still hold onto them for use in the actual purification ceremony…” I licked my lips at the pieces that came together in my mind. I imagined the ritual, the message we needed to send to Hircine, and the magic that it would all require. It wasn’t my style, but the more I thought about it, the more solid the picture became in my mind. “We need to find them, and kill them.”

That seemed to make perfect sense to Arvid. He said, “Sure, that makes sense.”

“We’ll also need souvenirs. I’m thinking… their heads.”

Now he gave pause. “Did you just say…?”

“Yes.”


	33. In Which She Beheads the Glenmoril Coven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slaying witches is outside of Brina's usual agenda, but to help some super-scary werewolves, she's up to the challenge.

The Companions had a synergy, a kinship, that reminded me too much of the Thieves Guild. Inside jokes and quips were always on their lips, shared memories always working into conversations, and their communication was often speckled with wordless cues and silent understandings, the signs of bonds that run so much deeper than just fighting side-by-side.

This was a real family, one that made my heart ache for Olev and Cicero or my home in Riften. The sting was made all the more poignant by how alienated I was from the group. As though they could read minds, they were always on the same page, always one step ahead of the others, while I bumbled along behind them, just scrambling to keep up.

Arvid and Farkas kindly went easy on me, apologizing when they noticed how I could barely keep up walking. It never felt right to ask to be carried, the way Cicero and Olev used to; for one thing, I thought Aela wouldn’t like me any more if I rode around on her lover, but also, I found that I couldn’t approach Farkas with such a request without remembering the massive hulk of fur and claws and teeth he could become at any moment. That irrational fear outweighed the pain of my leg even as I limped and tripped far behind.

Falkreath Hold’s atmosphere is strikingly like the Great Forest in that it’s so easy to get lost even on the roads with how thick and disorienting the woods are. Unlike the Great Forest, however, it’s a great deal colder and perpetually raining. Though it was supposedly summer as we traipsed through the trees, I don’t think the constant drizzle let up once. Moisture gathered in the trees and leaked down relentlessly in massive drops on us below so that there was no point in hiding under their cover for protection.

I volunteered my hide tent to be propped up and stretched over everyone, making our camp into a wall-less hut beside our fire. That meant that I wasn’t able to confine myself to it, so instead I went to sleep first each night to avoid any more uncomfortable conversations and to dodge Aela’s contempt-filled scowls.

With my eyes closed, I stayed at the edge of the covering, bundled into as small a ball as I could manage. I wished I could have played my kalimba to drown out the sounds of their jokes and conversation, but for the sake of not seeming like I was ignoring them, I pretended to sleep instead.

“So, ah… Arvid. You knew Brina before you became a Shield Brother, right?” I heard Farkas ask.

Was he suspicious of me? Was he going to admit that he disliked me, that he hated me, that he thought this was all a bad idea?

“Yeah, I knew her,” Arvid’s thick Nordic accent answered. “Pretty well, actually. We were good friends. She spent a lot of time in the guard barracks.”

I winced into my furs. Ugh, he made me sound like a prostitute! No wonder Arcadia warned me against visiting the barracks so much. I was shocked that I didn’t have a reputation, for all the nights I spent partying with the soldiers.

“Ah.”

“Why? She’s an alright girl, you know you can trust her.”

“Oh, I know. I was just wondering... She’s kind of cute, you know?”

The sound of mead spraying through Aela’s teeth forced another wince from me. “Her? Farkas, you’re a Companion, a member of the Circle! You can’t possibly imagine yourself with anyone outside Jorrvaskr! Especially one who’s terrified of you!”

“She’s not terrified of me,” Farkas said. “She’s terrified of werewolves. But if all goes well, that won’t be a problem for long.”

“She can’t come into Whiterun, though,” Arvid reminded Farkas, his vowels held out and his consonants sharper than they had been just a minute ago. “Or any city. She’s in hiding for the rest of her life.”

“I know what you’re thinking, Farkas, and absolutely not!” Aela said, at the same time that Farkas said, “She can hide in Jorrvaskr!”

“She’s going to cure us. Giving her a place to stay is the least we can do,” Farkas continued.

“Listen, Farkas,” Arvid said, pausing long enough to, I assume, take a long drink of his ale, “about Brina… She’s a good girl and all, but don’t bother.”

“Why not? She—“

“ _Don’t bother_. Women like her break men’s hearts.”

Why, thanks Arvid, for projecting my inability to love just you onto all men! My eyes rolled beneath their lids, and I had to be conscious of my breathing that I didn’t huff in indignation at his accusation.

“Besides, what would she even do in Jorrvaskr?” Aela asked. “A hedge witch hardly has a place in Ysgramor’s mead hall.”

“I think anyone who earns the title _Spirit of the Rift_ is a bit more than just a hedge witch,” Arvid offered. Someone stoked the fire, and the crackling drowned out whatever he said next.

Farkas was quick to answer, “We could use a hand around the hall. Brill left to stay in Dragonsreach after the battle, and Tilma can’t handle taking care of all of us anymore.”

“…Are you sure that’s wise?” Arvid asked at a length. “You did _taste_ that stew she made the other night, right? Would you want to eat _that_ every day for the rest of your life?”

I had to blink my eyes to make sure I wasn’t dreaming when I heard Aela, of all people, answer, “I thought it was delicious, actually. The best I’ve ever eaten. I suppose when you put it like that, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to keep her around. Tilma could use the help, and she can patch us up after a rough hunt.”

Amazing. Incredible. Of all the things I thought might have persuaded Aela to stop hating me, my cooking was the very, very last. A shame that the only redeeming quality she could find in me was her own broken sense of taste, but I would take it none the less.

Their conversation continued late into the night. I dozed off around then, but every now and again I’d be roused by laughter or a particularly sharp remark. Damn them and their happy little family; it made me dream of Big Brother and Cicero.

From the next morning on, though no one mentioned any of what they’d talked about to me, I couldn’t help but notice the change in the flow of conversation. Inside jokes were given explanations, stories were told with more detail to fill me in on the nuances of life in Jorrvaskr, and I even was asked my own thoughts on various matters. I wasn’t part of their little family, but nor was I a complete outsider, an interloper on their happy lives.

Stomping our way through the dense trees, it dawned on me suddenly that, though we’d been walking all day, I hadn’t fallen behind once, yet I knew I wasn’t moving any faster than usual. While the others made camp for the night, Aela charged me with preparing supper (much to Farkas and Arvid’s barely-concealed displeasure). She still showed no signs of _liking_ me, but I wasn’t getting the impression that she wanted to abandon me in the woods anymore. Which was nice.

Not even stopping in Falkreath, we went straight through it and into the wilderness beyond, seeking out the home of the Glenmoril coven, stopping only in the evenings for sleep. Heads, I told them, collect the heads. Best to kill them all, too, since we needed to thoroughly sever their pact. Also, it seemed prudent not to give them the chance to place a new, uglier curse on the Companions if they got the chance.

Glenmoril Coven sat in the hills at the edge of Skyrim’s border, far further west than I’d ever been in Skyrim, and getting dangerously deeper into the Thalmor’s realm of influence with every step. I kept Missus Loreius’s tattered hood over me at all times, even when we seemed to be alone on the road, just in case any passing Thalmor agents might catch a glimpse of me.

Being surrounded by tough companions who could literally smell incoming Altmer put me considerably more at ease than I’d have expected in a Thalmor-dense region.

The landscape opened as trees became scarcer in the rocky hillside. The only real difference that made was that the rain now hit us directly in its never-ending sprinkling.

Alea pointed up one jagged cliff. “There’s a cave up there. The smell of hagravens is thick. We’ve found our prey, I’m sure of it!”

I drew my tongue over my lips. Excitement built up in my cohorts, their eyes lighting in anticipation of battle, but all I could see was the steep cliff and the rocks and… I didn’t want to say it. I’d been biting back my complaints the whole way here, after days on end traveling, but I just couldn’t take it anymore. “I need to stop.”

“What, are you afraid?” Aela growled. Ah, there was that animosity I’d been spared the last couple of days! “Just stay here, then. We’ll go without you.”

“No, I’m not afraid,” I squeaked. “But I need to rest my leg. Climbing up there would be hard even on my best days, but we’ve been on the move for so long, I can hear my bones snapping just _thinking_ about making that hike!”

“Your leg?” Aela said, blinking.

“What, did you think I just walk at a snail’s pace for the fun of it? My left leg has more bone uselessly lodged in the muscle than actually holding to together properly.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t quite tell, but her cheeks may have flushed a little at the revelation. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she looked embarrassed. “What happened?”

I didn’t wait for permission. I plopped right down on the side of the road, stretching my aching leg out in front of me. “I fell of a waterfall. Didn’t make it any better by falling off Whiterun’s wall, then out a second-story window, then off the city of Riften. Oh, and I fell through a hole in the floor of a tower and landed on a bookcase.” It was actually a wonder that I hadn’t taken another bad fall in a while. Shouldn’t have thought that, I realized a moment later. Just remembering how lucky I’d been probably tempted fate.

Surely she’d been hoping I would tell some interesting tale, maybe one of heroics or bravery, to prove her wrong about the milk-drinking mage they’d been forced to lug around with them. And yet, despite my very mundane answer summing up to a series of bad falls, her brows lifted. “Might not be much of a fighter, but you are a survivor, aren’t you?” I’d swear she sounded impressed, thought it was hard to read her expression through the thick smears of warpaint across her face.

“I’ve been described as a lot of things, but never a survivor,” I admitted.

“Why don’t you just heal it?” Farkas asked, sitting down beside me. I knew he wasn’t the least bit tired—he could run all day long and never run out of breath.

“It’s shattered pretty badly, and I’ve let it sit like this more months. I guess if I ever tried, I’d probably need to get in there physically before I could put magic to it. And while I know I’m a competent healer, I’m not so sure I could carve open my own leg and pull pieces of bon out of my muscles, and then heal that whole mess.”

They didn’t rush me. I never asked for Farkas to help me to my feet when I was at last ready to continue, but he pulled me up with just a shadow of a smile.

Every step up the steep, rocky path forced the gravity of the situation down on the Companions. I watched as their shoulders tenses, their eyes focused, and their mannerisms turned nervous. Electricity seemed to build in the air between them, and I entertained myself with the thought of three big, fuzzy werewolves all fluffed up from static. They weren’t so scary when I imagined them looking like unsheared sheep…

The cave at the top of the hill stopped me in my tracks. Reach magic, until now, had only ever been tall tales and gossip to me. But the torches, decorated with innards of some hapless creatures, illuminated bones and discarded flesh around the mouth of the cave. Wind did not blow, it seemed, and the stagnant air hung heavily with the sickly-sweet smell of decay. An animal’s skull stared at us through empty eyes from a pike beside in the entrance.

Walking to it, I felt more aware of my surroundings than I had in a long time. I could identify every bone that was human, and knew from exactly where the bone had been taken on the body. Less-decomposed bits showed signs of struggle, the skin ripped in ragged gashes and ligaments torn asunder by something dull and crude. Suffering saturated the ground, and before I’d even made it inside, I felt my skin go cold and clammy. How was I afraid of werewolves when things like this existed in the world? The weight of evil pulled my soul downward, until I could barely walk and wanted nothing more than to run back to Falkreath and hide!

“Are you ready?” Arvid asked gently beside me. We faced a dragon together. I saved his life so that, minutes later, he could stand atop the dragon and slay it in a brilliant display that would make him famous to the people of Whiterun. It would earn him enough respect to turn the whole city against Commander Caius when I was wrongfully imprisoned for poisoning Honningbrew Meadery, and later for Anoriath’s yet-unanswered murder. And when the Thalmor asked for me, and the Stomcloaks came marching, he chose to be a son of Skyrim before he would sacrifice someone he loved to the elves.

I should have loved him. I really ought to have. But instead, I had immense respect for him, and I knew I would be safe with him in this cave, whatever dark, evil magic awaited us. In the battle with the dragon, there had been no casualties. Such would be the case today, and while Arvid and his friends slayed the wickedness inside, I would protect them.

Swallowing any remaining trepidation, I blurted, “Yes!” before I could change my mind.

The narrow cave, dark and damp and thick with that smell of rotting flesh, was as terrifying to descend into as one would expect. The bottoms of my worn boots slipped in something slick that [i]popped[/i] as my heel slid over it, and while I had no idea what it was, I felt my stomach turn just imagining what it would have looked like if I weren’t in perfect darkness.

It opened into a huge cavern. Being at the back of the group, I barely even made it into the light before the Companions ahead of me rushed out. It was like fighting beside three Olevs, all equally fierce and unafraid, charging in with weapons swinging. Even Aela the archer wasn’t afraid to get up close to the hags waiting within.

In Farkas’s dominating shadow, I almost couldn’t see the little hag. Small and crumpled, misshapen by her own vile magic, she wore shreds of hide for clothing and shrieked horrid birdlike sounds from a shriveled mouth. Her hands like claws held aloft potent magic, which she threw in a frenzy. Fire and ice, explosions and shattering shards, it all happened so fast I could hardly tell what had happened. All I knew was that her little white head of thin, greasy hair was directly in my line of sight. The crackle of thunder resounded loudly from my fingertips, reverberating from the stone walls like a whole storm contained in the small cavern. The bolt hit her, knocking the charges of magicka off her hands, but she wasn’t killed until an arrow pierced her solidly between the eyes.

It happened quickly, but that she had stayed standing and fighting when attacked at once by three formidable warriors and a mage was impressive. And, since we’d by no means been silent or subtle, her sisters would certainly be prepared for their turns.

“Well?” Aela said, turning on me. “Aren’t you going to collect its head?”

“I don’t know if you’re actually asking, or if you’re just teasing me, but try to remember that I’m here _doing you lot a favor_ ,” I grumbled under my breath. Werewolf or not, and even if she was being marginally kinder to me the last couple days, my patience was quickly wearing thin. Perhaps being alone in the woods had left me out of practice in dealing with people.

She laughed, but I couldn’t place what she thought was so funny. And, before I could say anything else, she bent down and tore through the witch’s neck herself with her razor-sharp Skyforged dagger.

I healed up what little burns and cuts Farkas and Arvid got before we moved on, and did my best to remember how the witch had moved and launched her spells. I’d be ready next time. She wouldn’t stand a chance! And, just to be sure, I dug a couple less-used vials from the very bottom of my satchel. Poisons aren’t my expertise, or even my interest, but I knew when easy household staples had uses in more pressing situations. “Crumble this between your fingers and rub the oils on your weapons before we find the others,” I instructed. “Red mountain flower and lavender—when not used as potpourri (it works great for freshening floor thresh or bedstraw, I brought it with me to keep from smelling like a troll), it can sap magicka from an unruly mage if it gets into the bloodstream. That should make her sisters a little less problematic.”

The cavern split in places, and while I would have gotten us lost in minutes, Arvid took the vanguard with a playful tap of his nose. “The wolf can smell them,” he explained with a canine smile.

I had to swallow back my fear before I could force a reciprocating smile.

How did anyone live in these conditions? Torches and barbaric braziers barely lit the space and filled the air with putrid smoke. Nothing in the place looked like any sort of home. I may have been a hermit, but at least I lived like a civilized hermit! These hags were giving humble eccentrics like me a bad name!

Right on Aela’s heels, I followed them through the darkness until we emerged in a high-ceilinged cavern. On a ledge overlooking our point of entry, the Glenmoril witch was waiting for us.

Her fireball was met by a sparkling wall of protective energy. Behind my ward, we barely felt so much as a warm breeze, and even the sound of the explosion was muffled to us. The ward went down, and out went a trio of arrows in quick succession, followed by two fearsome men. Farkas ran straight for the ledge, and while I’d never have guessed he could do it, he half-leapt, half-climbed his way up without so much as sheathing his sword. Arvid took the less upfront approach, darting to the side of the chamber where the ground rose to run to the top of the ledge. He was chopping at the hag a heartbeat after Farkas.

No wonder they sent three Companions to take care of these witches! Maybe if they’d only sent one it may have proven a challenge; but the Companions were hardly lacking in members, and it would have been irresponsible to send any fewer on a mission as important as this.

The killing blow was a swift slice of Arvid’s sword through the hag’s throat. The wrinkled head sailed through the air and was caught with a victorious cry in Aela’s gauntleted hand just inches short of cracking me in the nose.

Since the warriors needed to be ready for battle, carrying the heads fell to me. Aela instructed me in holding them by the hair so I wouldn’t have to handle their warm skin.

“Can you at least close their eyes?” I pleaded behind them. Their beady little red eyes were staring right at me!

“Sorry, damsel-in-distress,” Aela chuckled over her shoulder. “We keep closing them and they just keep opening! You’ll have to get used to it!”

“I get the distinct impression that if I hold them too close, they might bite me!”

“They might!” Aela laughed. “If you were a werewolf, you could bite back!”

We were headed back to the main chamber, from which we would find the remaining witches. Of course, we were hardly being sneaky, and the hagravens knew that their coven was compromised. Perhaps if the whole cave didn’t reek like them, the Companions wouldn’t have been so taken by surprise.

This time, it was miraculous that I managed to put up the ward in time since the only warning we received was a brief flash of light upon exiting the tunnel. I don’t know how many fireballs were aimed at us, but all four of us were pushed back from the force of the explosions against the ward, and even despite my magical barrier we were overcome by a rush of heat that I feared would cook the Companions in the armor!

Thank goodness for the poison on their blades and Aela’s arrows, because I feared how long we could last if such an assault could be allowed to continue.

I dropped my shield and threw out some fire of my own, making sure to pack enough energy into it that when it hit the nearest hag, she fell forward to her hands and feet. Claws and feet… Claws and claws? It was hard to tell what on the monster was supposed to be human anymore. At any rate, she wouldn’t be an immediate threat, and the fire licking away at her torn attempt at clothing would only postpone her reentrance into the fray further.

And speaking of flames, I ought to have dropped the head before I went casting spells. The Glenmoril witch’s unkempt hair went up in bursts and dropped from my hands to _splat_ on the ground below, and all at once the little tunnel we inhabited filled with the smell of burning hair.

No time to think about that! We had four angry hags spinning multicolored lights of malevolent magic between long claws, and one more crowing on the floor in pain and fury. I stirred the magicka from my being into another ball of heat, concentrated it between my palms, and aimed at the next hag—

All at once, my view was blocked, and my concentration shattered by the three masses of muscle and fur in front of me. They had to know I was useless when they did that! I dropped to the ground beside the heads, and was too horrified at the beasts going on their rampage that I didn’t even mind the way the two heads glared at me.

Damn it, but I had a job to do! And terrifying as the monsters were, they were on my side!

They weren’t that bad, I told myself. They were just like Olev, if he were hairier, that’s all! Crawling at first, I stood up fully once I emerged from the tunnel.

I lost track of which werebeast was which, but I went instinctively to the one currently wedges between two hags. It shrugged off the blasts of flame and zaps of electricity, but already blood began to mat in its fur. Without thinking (because if I were, how could I have justified such action?), I slid directly beside the beastie. My left hand went back, touching the coarse fur and twitching muscle and – _oh, by the Eight and Talos, don’t imagine it turning around and biting your arm off!_ – pulsed warm restorative magicka through it. My left hand tried at my earlier spell one more time, and this time successfully shot a flare directly into the witch’s face.

Her claws snapped and clacked together, and I caught the flash of light behind her talons turn from searing red to hazy blue. My ward went back up just in time to repel the spear of ice before it could impale me. More satisfying was the crash sound of the lance shattering and her subsequent scream when the shrapnel dug into her.

Ward down, hand up, I continued to block and parry in a magical duel unlike I’d ever fought before. All the while, I sidestepped and hopped backward, always following blindly behind the werewolf to keep the flow of healing energy uninterrupted.

Every spark, every fireball, every reconstruction of my ward left me dizzier and dizzier. By the time the hag showed any signs of wear, my head was swimming, fingertips numb and soul sapped of its innate connection with Aetherius, the channels between me and the greater realm drained dry. I just needed to dig into my satchel—I just needed to get a potion, restore my magicka, and then I could send this witch to Oblivion! I threw my ward up once more, just to give me a chance to grab at a bottle, when the veil between me and her cracked. The last of my magicka dissolved like void salts in hot water, and I watched helplessly as the hagraven swept forward, talons reaching for me to pull my own head off my shoulders as we’d done to her sisters.

And arrow lodged itself just under her clavicle, knocking her shoulder back and making her reel. It was only a moment, but the time it took her to regain her composure was all it took for me to pour the contents of the bottle into my mouth and instantly feel the rush of Aetherial inspiration into my being.

I wouldn’t let Aela take the kill. More determined than I’d felt in a long time, more inspired than I felt since staring down the scholar through the bars of his cell, my need to prove myself driving me forward.

The little girl alone and crying in the woods disgusted me. The foolish child whining for a family that didn’t exist all across the empire broke my heart. The selfish brat who refused Mara in Nightcaller Temple shamed me. But those heart-wrenchingly flawed women were all me, and damn it, they deserved some thrice-damned respect! Because I may have been a typical Imperial damsel in distress, but at least I could do _this!_

One hand brought to life a storm, and the other held my empty bottle of magicka potion. I flung it forward, smiling with grim approval as it smacked the wretch in the teeth, and let the lightning arc for her in the same instant. The glass shattered against her skin, every shard sparkling with magic and carrying the charge in a hundred glimmering knives that plunged into her with the force of my spell and the sting of electricity.

The last sound to echo through the cavern was the final bits of broken glass hitting the ground in sweet ringing tones. I could barely hear over my own ragged breathing, “By the Nine!”

I dropped on my backside, shaking my head at the gruesome sight before me. A hand dropped on my shoulder, and I jumped as much at the unexpected contact as I did at the jolt of static that resulted from the touch. “You alright?” Arvid asked.

“I am…” I gasped. It was a lie. I felt a mess. I needed a bath. I needed to never eat any kind of bird ever again. I needed to avoid broken glass for the rest of my life. “How is everyone else?”

“Standing, thanks to you,” he said, kneeling beside me. Farkas and Aela stalked around behind him, human and covered in blood that, mostly, didn’t appear to be their own. “You jumped right in!”

“Thanks for that, by the way,” Aela chimed in. Then, with great effort, she added, “I needed it.”

“Yeah, well, you saved me, too.”

“Of course. Rescuing maidens is part of being a Companion!”

Despite myself, I felt a laugh spill from my still-shaking lips. “Here I thought you hated me, and you’ve been playing my knight-in-shining armor this whole time!”

We made camp at the bottom of the hill, facing away from the cursed cave. Of all the witches we encountered, only four heads remained enough intact to really be brought with us, and they all took up residence in a leather sack Arvid had brought along for carrying skins of animals they hunted for food on the trip. Honestly, I was just happy not to have them leering at me all night.

And, as much as I actually wanted to stay awake and celebrate, as soon as the Companions pulled bottles—and bottles upon bottles—of ale from their packs, I hurriedly bid them goodnight. Our fragile friendship surely would not survive a visit from Uncle Sanguine, I thought, nestling myself in my fursand sighing away as much of my residual tension as I could.

Ugh, I’d sleep so much better with a drink! Just one bottle of ale, and they would be so happy to have me drink with them! I licked my dry, dry lips and tried to forget about the warm, comforting flavor, the sweet way it made my mind numb and vision blur…

“I know what you said about Brina before,” Farkas said, effectively wiping my thoughts clear of drink, “but I think once all of this is over… Well… We’re going to ask Kodlak to let her stay, right?”

“Yeah,” Arvid said. He paused, and when he spoke again, it was with a swallow of ale and a gulp of fresh air. “I think she deserves a real home, and people who will look out for her. Why?”

“I dunno… Just thought she was pretty cute. That’s all.”

“That’s all? You’ve already said that. We know you think she’s cute. So what?” If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was getting irate!

“I think she’s cute, too, Farkas,” Aela said. “You’d make a good pair.”

I wondered if Farkas remembered dancing under the Gildergreen with me. Did he think about that night? Did he think about his big hands on my hips, or the way he swung me around so that my feet lifted from the ground? Did he remember that that girl he danced with was even the same person?

And, for a dark moment, I tried to picture myself sitting on his lap in Jorrvaskr, sipping from his flagon of mead, cheering him on in his little games with his guildmates. I let the images die when I felt my heart crack.

The Companions would never be my guildmates. Jorrvaskr would never be my Ragged Flagon. Arvid and Aela would never be my Olev and Cicero. And Thrynn…

Poor Farkas. Arvid was right about me after all.


	34. In Which She Goes to Jorrvaskr

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to Jorrvaskr, home of the honorable, mighty, legendary Companions! Also, Brina's own personal hell. But there's one bright side to this place that doesn't suit her.

“So, back to Whiterun! It’s a shame no one will get to know you’re there, but won’t it feel nice at least being home?” Arvid asked. Skyforged armor suited him. Just being a Companion suited him. The heavy steel showed no signs of weighing or slowing him down, and in fact, he carried much of the camp on his back without a word of complaint. Bright and early in the morning, we were heading back east, this time swinging north over the small mountain range to head directly back to Whiterun. The walk would take many days, but none of the hardened Companions would be slowed by footsores.

At my side, Farkas walked a little closer than he ever had before, and for once, the warm, musky masculine smell didn’t come with the striking mental image of him transforming into a snarling half-wolf, half-man beast. He stood far taller than me, but since coming to Skyrim, the presence of large, intimidating Nord males had become a comfort to me. Thrynn, Olev, Arvid, Farkas, I was finding that surrounding myself with big, scary men was almost suiting. It took something menacing for a little healer like me to feel like I might be safe and taken seriously.

Maybe, just maybe, I could work myself out of all these asinine concerns just come to appreciate the Companions and Farkas as their own separate things. I’d never get over the Thieves Guild or my boys if I kept comparing everyone else to them, and part of me ached for the friendships and love that I was denying myself in others.

“I’ve never even been in Jorrvaskr,” I said. “And this is all assuming that Kodlak will be alright with me staying… Don’t you think that one building might be a bit… confining?”

“It’s not small, and you’ll be free to roam the grounds. You can even hang around the Skyforge!” Arvid offered.

Still sounded pretty small to me, I thought with a twist of my lips. But I needed a place to go, and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad when I made a family of the warriors.

I had nothing else to lose.

Thick forests and rain and mud gave way to the wide, sprawling steppes and countryside that had been my home for so long. I forgot how massive Skyrim felt when you could look out and see what felt like an eternity in any direction, with hardly any trees to mar the horizon, and only multicolored heather and low-growing flowers to turn the hard-packed earth into a rainbow of color. Whiterun Hold, how I missed its humble beauty! And how Whiterun seemed to know the difference between seasons, and actually had warm weather, shining sun, and no constant stream of relentless pouring rain! Ah, I could _sing!_

These folks found it less cute than previous traveling companions when I wandered off the road or off course to pick flowers or gather weeds, but no protests were made, and Farkas followed me loyally without any need for explanation when my eye was caught randomly by a perfect specimen. I even gave him instructions—gather blue flowers! Just the blue ones! Yes, good job, Farkas, thank you—and earned myself a helper. Maybe his friends didn’t see the humor I found in walking up to Whiterun’s gate with a hulking Companion, flowers sticking from his armor wherever I could fit them. I’d have made him a crown out of them if that hadn’t been toeing a fine line.

Drawing near to the city, Dragonsreach stretching from the horizon to loom over the low wall, I tried to spy the old building I hadn’t crossed in… Something struck my heart the instant I caught sight of the dilapidated farmhouse, and all at once I realized just how long it had been since I was secretly living in that skeleton of a building. My fellow travelers turned to stare at me quizzically, as I’d stopped dead in my tracks, watching an old wrecked house with bewilderment.

“Brina? Is there something there?”

“What day is today?” I asked, amazed.

They shared a look, and at last Aela hesitantly offered, “It must be… the first of Heartfire.”

Just as I thought. I shook my head, but my face couldn’t decide between the tears that welled in my eyes or the half-smile that tried to turn up my lips. “I’ve been in Skyrim for a year!” I couldn’t figure if I was happy about that, or sad.

Another year spent looking. Another year spent without a home. Almost six years since I lost my little farm on Kvatch. If I tried really hard, could I even remember what that house felt like? Try as I might, I found that I couldn’t recall the sound of my mother’s voice anymore.

And what had Skyrim given me? So much pain, so much happiness and friendship torn from my weary hands, so many homes that could have been. I hated this place. I hated these stunningly beautiful plans as much as I hated the bewitching Rift, or the lush Falkreath Forest, or the vibrant volcanic Eastmarch, or the enchanting snowy fields of the Pale. I hated it all, because try as I might to reason with it, it all hated me back.

Nestled in the vivid weeds, covered by some crawly moss sporting sweet little white blooms, the old house had a sort of unexpected charm. Skyrim had claimed the wreckage, and while the land alone could not fix it or save it, it could hold the broken thing in an embrace, as though suffocating it to a peaceful death. If only Skyrim had been so beautiful and gentle in destroying me, too.

I wouldn’t keep us any longer, but I couldn’t help a wistful sigh at leaving the old house behind. For a while, that had been my home, when I had no money for a bed at the inn and before Elrindir and Anoriath took me in. I slept on a mostly-rotted bedframe filled with perpetually-damp straw and vermin. I hid from the rain in the little spots where bits of the roof still remained, and curled up against whichever wall best blocked the wind. Since the hearth always seemed right in the path of a breeze, and could never hold a fire, I’d taken to hiding my meager possessions in the ashes. What a simple time. How I missed it.

As we approached the city proper, I made peace with the summer heat and my decision to wear my long, heavy priest robes, the cowl pulled low to hide my face and wild mane of hair. My stature and build were still apparent for all the guards to see and recognize. As Arvid led the way through the bailey, waving and saying hearty hellos to former comrades, more than a few iron helms nodded to me silently. The gates swung wide for us as we approached to a cheer of, “Hail, Companions!” and, “Welcome back, Arvid!” and, if my ears didn’t deceive me, a single whispered, “Hail, Spirit.”

“When we get in there,” Arvid asked, casting me a sidelong glance of his azure eyes, “do you know what you need to ask?”

I nodded. “We need some place to perform the ceremony to sever the covenant. We need something significant. If Jorrvaskr will work, then perfect, but if Kodlak has something in mind, like maybe where the pact was made to begin with, or a symbolic place to take a stand against Hircine and demand independence from his influence, we should seek it out. If he has any ideas—“

A shriek somewhere in the distance prompted Aela instantly into a run, without so much as a word to any of us. It seemed to be coming from the Cloud District. After just a moment, Arvid and Farkas followed behind her, leaving me to hobble after them as quickly as I could. Which is to say, not quickly at all, but I tried.

“What’s happened?” I wheezed, teetering up the stairs to the upper residential district. Damn, but how did they have so much stamina that they could run all this way without stopping?!

Jorrvaskr was abuzz, with Companions darting around madly up and down the stairs, and city guards hollering at citizens. I could barely make sense of what I was seeing until, charging up the steps to Jorrvaskr, I saw it.

Bodies littered the stairs leading to the overturned boat of Ysgramor. Companions stood triumphantly over some, or knelt, bleeding by others. My first instinct was to go to the nearest Companion to start healing them, but I’d barely started ascending the steps before Arvid appeared before me, snatching my arm and pulling me onward.

“Hey, what are you—?”

“They’ll be fine! You can get to them later! But there’s no time for Kodlak! Come on!” His heavy accent somehow had gotten thicker, weighed down by and made ragged by emotion. His hand gripped my forearm with unintentional strength, but for all his squeezing, I could still feel him shaking.

Jorrvaskr was just as I’d always imagined. The smell of mead permeated the warm air. Even in the summertime, the big hearth in the center of the hall was alive with fire, and the long tables set around it were filled with food, though it wasn’t suppertime for many more hours yet. For all its homey qualities, though, the signs of a struggle painted a clear picture of some dramatic battle. Chairs overturned, puddles of mead all over the floor, tables sporting gashes and shattered wood from misplaced strikes. And there, on the floor, lay the object of Arvid’s horror.

His heavy armor did nothing to protect his exposed face. The side of his face was crushed, the rest of it discolored and misshapen by whatever force had smashed his jaw into powder.

“Where have you been?” another warrior, Farkas’s twin brother Vilkas, was admonishing Aela and Farkas, and now Arvid as he pulled me forward.

“We were doing Kodlak’s bidding!” Arvid choked, barely containing the rage that built right beneath the surface of his face, turning his cheeks red and making his blond beard puff up like an angry sabrecat.

He pushed me forward, to the man on the ground. Did he think I could _heal_ this? This wasn’t the job for an alchemist, this was a job for a necromancer! I tried to say something, or at least to shake my head at him and give him an apologetic look to show that the man was simply beyond saving, but Arvid didn’t so much as afford me a glance.

“I hope it was important, because it means you weren’t here to defend him!” Vilkas continued.

I stood awkwardly beside the body, feeling perfectly small and useless as I ever had in my life. Without much else to do, I knelt down beside the fallen Harbinger to test his pulse. Nothing, of course. He was gone, his body already going cool. As I thought, he was too far gone for me to save.

Vilkas’s tone of bitterness turned acidic. “The Silver Hand,” he spat. “They finally found enough courage to attack Jorrvaskr! We found them off but… The old man. Kodlak. He’s…”

“We brought the healer, though!” Arvid interrupted, waving down at me emphatically. “He’ll be fine! And we can cure the lycanthropy! He’ll be alive and well and free of the curse!”

“Arvid,” I whimpered. “I’m so sorry, but…”

“I promised I would help him! I promised I would help all of us!” Arvid cried, not hearing, or not listening to me at all. “He can’t just be dead! I only left so that we could find a cure!”

Farkas set one large hand against Arvid’s chest, pushing him a full step back from his equally-upset brother. “Shieldbrother, you need to breathe. You’re losing control.”

That was an understatement. I watched as Arvid’s soft, fluffy yellow hair seemed to go dark before my eyes. His whole body convulsed against the unnatural demand of instinct and animalistic fury. Blood ran cold in my veins, for I knew all too well what might come next.

Leaping gracefully between the two men, Aela caught her lover by the shoulders and shook him with the firm affection that could only be accomplished by a woman who is just as much in love as she is fed up with a man. “Save it for the Silver Hand! If you want blood, take it from those who deserve it!”

Not the quaking little Imperial on the floor next to your dead master, please and thank you!

“Was anyone else hurt?” Farkas asked.

His twin shook his head, but his light blue eyes remained narrowed in their dark, sunken sockets. “No, but they made off with all our fragments of Wuuthrad, among other personal items. Insult on injury, the loathsome bastards.”

“They can’t get away with this!” Arvid growled in a voice like something from my nightmares. Barely human, the guttural rumbling vibrated through stone beneath us like an earthquake.

“They won’t,” the Companion agreed. “You and I are going to reclaim the pieces of Wuuthrad, and everything else they stole. We will bring the battle to their chief camp! There will be none left living to tell their stories! Only songs of Jorrvaskr will be sung!”

No one had mentioned that, along with a Daedric curse, there was also a murderous feud going on here! I certainly wouldn’t turn my back on the Companions in their time of need, but damn it, it would have been nice to know what kind of mess I was getting involved in! I dropped my hand to the breastplate of Kodlak’s armor, sighing a mournful hum.

For almost two weeks, I listened to stories of how wonderful this man was. How he helped raised Farkas and his brother, how he became like a father to Arvid, how he guided Aela and taught all the Companions of honor and valor. Between my talents and his respected wisdom, we were supposed to end the curse. I never got the chance to meet him. I wished I could have heard his philosophical musings for myself, or talked to him about his many adventures. I’d never get the chance to know if he’d have changed my life, too, as he had for so many others.

“We will avenge Kodlak,” Arvid agreed through teeth clenched so hard, I could hear his jaw popping from the pressure. For all his frustration, his impulse to change forms slowly died, his voice sounding more like his own now. “And they will know terror before the end.”

My sweet, stupid Arvid. My favorite guard, the charming soldier who walked me home from the Cauldron to the Huntsman every night, who kissed me through the bars of Dragonsreach Dungeon. This didn’t sound like him. My heart broke for the big, kind Stormcloak fool I refused to marry. He didn’t deserve this.

In a way, not the way he wanted, but in a very real way, I did love him.

But I couldn’t help but feel like they were getting ahead of themselves. Did they already forget about the corpses littering their hall? I swayed uncomfortably, looking to all the companions in turn, waiting for some indication of what to do next.

Thankfully, as tempers cooled and Companions came in from outside, they all set to work removing bodies. The diminutive figure of a frail woman wobbled over, bucket and rag in hand. How she could even carry the bucket of water baffled me; she looked practically ancient, with her skin hanging loose on her skinny body and flecked by spots of age. Hands shook as she set to scrub blood from the floor. No wonder they could justify bringing me in as an assistant to the woman, who I assumed must be Tilma. I supposed it would be my duty, as my residence in Jarrvaskr was vindicated by being her helper, to help her clean up, and for an instant, I was torn whether to pick up a rag or to go to the nearest bleeding warrior.

Sorry, Tilma. I would be a horrible assistant as long as Jorrvaskr housed wounded Companions.

The nearest, and most injured warrior was plopped down heavily in a chair, already nursing himself with a large mug of mead. I wanted to smack it out if his stupid hands— _really_ , did he _really_ think he needed a drink before so much as bandaging himself?!

“Set the mead down,” I ordered as I settled in the chair beside him and, without asking permission, reached out to unhook his cuirass.

He regarded me with a lifted brow and scoffed, “And why should I listen to—hey, what do you think you’re doing? Get away from there!”

“I’m Tilma’s new helper, and you’re getting blood all over the floor. I’m stopping the mess from getting any bigger. Now, set the mead down and lift your arms over your head—“

“What? Tilma’s new _what_?! Are you daft, get away from me?”

Ugh, being a healer among these people would be difficult! The realization hit me even harder as, with just a slight shift in how he held himself, I realized almost too late that he was going to punch me. His fist knocked uselessly on a wall of magical energy, and I made sure he could see my glower from the other side of the ward. “I’ll hold you down if I have to,” I hissed. I healed a vampire against its will; this drunkard wouldn’t get away.

“You’re… the girl Arvid was talking about,” the Companion said. His face turned mystified, and he seemed to forget about his knuckles resting on my ward. “The Spirit of the Rift. He actually found you. Never expected it…”

Spirit of the Rift? The sound of it made me grimace. It made me sound _dead!_ “Yes, well, he did. So, will you put your damn mug down for me _now_? I can’t patch you up when you’re punching at me.”

It worked much like that for most of the fighters. Most were too proud to accept healing, and some wouldn’t even take a potion from my bandolier. So, when I had seen to the health of the few who would let me get near them, I finally plodded over to Tilma and began scrubbing.

It seemed I would be spending more time as a maid here than anything else, I thought miserably. Oh, well. For revenge, I would insist to Tilma that I cook supper for everyone. That would teach them to force me into domestic work.

A few nights of my stew, and they’d be _begging_ me to just be a full-time healer!

As I pondered how many butterfly wings I could work into a meal before it became too obvious, scrubbing up puddles of blood, the smoky room became suddenly brighter. Across the hall, Farkas was coming back into Jorrvaskr, giving his brother one last embrace in the doorway before Vilkas and Arvid disappeared into Whiterun together.

“Are you alright?” I asked gently, standing slowly to meet him.

His bright blue eyes found me, and for a minute he chewed on his lips in silence. When his mouth opened to speak, he choked on the words, went back to chewing on his lips, and finally made do with a quick shake of his head.

My heart snapped clean at the sight. I was at his side, patting his big arm and wishing so badly I were good at fixing more than cuts and bruises. “Do you want me to make you some tea?” I asked uncertainly.

For a moment, my question stole away his melancholy while he stared at me with the blankest stare I’d ever seen on his big, shaggy head. Puzzled, he said at last, “N… no thank you.”

Well, it was worth a try, though I suppose he really didn’t seem the type to relax by curling up with a book and a hot mug of tea. “How about I bring you some mead?”

This time, it took no thought or hesitation for him to nod his head firmly. “I could use that.”

“Good.”

My first night with the Companions did not include the boisterous songs and cheers that Jorrvaskr was known for. No rowdy behavior, no celebration. Instead, I assisted Tilma in serving mead from their massive horde while they sat around drinking it morosely. Maybe I never asked to be the so-called Spirit of the Rift, and I definitely never intended it, but going from that to serving-girl certainly felt like a big step down.

Running around and refilling flagons and setting out food was so hectic, I couldn’t even pause long enough to long for a sip myself. In the back of my mind, the slightest whisper of temptation was almost entirely drowned out by the calls and demands of hungry fighters. I caught Aela’s gaze once or twice, a crinkle between her brows as if she was thinking hard on something, but slowing down didn’t feel like an option. Between the neediness of the crowd full of depressed, hungry, drunken Companions and my own desires to down a flagon or two myself, there was simply no way.

It went for hours. Miserable hours of watching the Companions drink away their sorrows, nurse their wounds (did none of them know the first thing about cleaning cuts?! Was he using a mead-soaked rag as a bandage?! What kind of savages were these?!), and growl with contempt for the Silver Hand, and yet they showed no signs of going to bed or anything.

This was the first night, my very first impression of Jorrvaskr, and while I felt for their loss… I hated the place. The idea that this would be my life, helping Tilma cook and clean and cater to these ungrateful, crass bunch of brawlers was a nightmare.

I was only as welcome and as wanted here as the mead I dropped on the tables. How could this ever be a home? Maybe if I could swing a sword, maybe if I could spar with them, or draw back a bow, call them Shield Brothers, then maybe I would have a place here.

Unlikely. Painfully unlikely.

Every once in a while, paranoid worries echoed in my head: did they hate me; they had slowed down to accommodate me on the road, would they have gotten here in time if not for my frailness; did they _blame_ me; did they think I should have saved Kodlak, somehow; were they disappointed that the healer they went so far for was powerless in the first task asked of her, one that resulted in their Harbinger being lost to them forever?

I couldn’t stand to look any of them in the eye, and more than once I looked upward and counted the planks in the ceiling, holding my breath to control my emotions as the stress and self-consciousness threatened to boil over.

“You look like a hummingbird,” Farkas said, watching me replace an empty platter with a massive plate of meat. “I don’t think I’ve seen you stop moving once.”

“There are hummingbirds in Skyrim?” I answered. “I’ve never seen one here! Isn’t it a bit cold--?”

“That was mostly about you running around so much. Less about hummingbirds.”

“Oh.”

Though he was seated with his Shield Brothers and Sisters on either side, for once he looked directly at me, and only at me, undistracted from the conversations around him or the general air of mourning. And, though his eyes were red and face still ashen, his lips turned in the slightest smile. “You look a mess, like you haven’t even taken a breath in an hour. Sit down and share a drink.”

“I couldn’t.” I was walking away even as I said it. “There’s too much to do, and I couldn’t just sit around when—“

The words were stolen from me when his huge hand came down on my shoulder—how had he gotten up, around the table, and behind me so fast?—and he steered me back in the other direction, toward the front of the overturned ship and to a staircase leading downward. At the bottom, in the dark doorway to the living quarters, I planted my feet on the stone.

“Farkas?” I asked, hoping for some explanation. I needed only to look back to his face to see it. So many things that he couldn’t put into words through his clamped jaw or tight lips, feelings he didn’t trust himself to express eloquently enough to do justice, but reflecting in his eyes for me to see.

He was in pain and was seeking comfort and company. There was an expectant intensity on how he looked at me, perhaps because he knew that I had lost my parents and could sympathize with their loss, or perhaps because he thought I was cute and hoped I could help him escape the atmosphere of sadness and regret and anger in the hall above.

Whatever it was, he wouldn’t say aloud. But whatever it was, he needed it, and it was up to me to figure out what kind of healing he was silently asking for.

I could weep with him, stroke his back while he cried into my shoulder, and mourn with him, but it occurred to me in the same instant how wrong it felt to imagine such of the wolf of a man before me.

So I tried the second option. Going up on my toes, I was still far too short to reach him. That he bent forward to meet me confirmed it, then, I’d guessed right, and his lips hit mine with a hunger I should have expected from a werewolf.

Two hands big as bear’s paws went to my waist just like they did when he danced with me so long ago. While this wasn’t the life I wanted, and certainly not a place I could confidently call home, with people I could never imagine calling family, maybe I could at least have one thing to make life in Jorrvaskr worth it. And maybe I really could fall in love with this beastly Companion. Maybe he was my ray of light in this dark little corner of the world.

He practically carried me to his room. At least, I thought it was his room, but who was I to ask questions at a time like this? The heady taste of mead on his lips suffocated any arguments any reasonable part of me may have had, and the scratch of the scruff on his face combined with the calloused hands perusing me through my dress made me melt. This wasn’t like any sex I’d had before, with at least some amount of romance. This was frantic, needy, emotional in all the wrong ways; but that was exactly what we both needed, and as long as we both got what we required, this relationship might be exactly the thing for us, I thought as he pulled my dress up over my head and discarded it on the floor beneath his narrow bed.

Getting his armor off wasn’t nearly as smooth, but I’d seen Olev work with similar buckles and belts and fastenings a million times on his ebony plate, so that between both of us working at it, it was free in no time. Since I’d been standing there in my smalls in an underground stone room, I couldn’t get his warm body on me fast enough.

I think he meant to be gentle when he pulled me to the surface of his narrow bed, but his muscles were so tightly wound that I plopped hard enough on my backside to yelp in surprise. How the giant Nord fit on it himself was amazing, but that we’d be sharing it gave me pause. I’d just sleep on top of him. Dear Farkas was so solid he probably wouldn’t be the least bit affected by my weight on him anyway.

The distracted prattling in my brain ceased the moment he pushed me onto my back and crawled on top of me, his mouth finding mine once more in the dim, hazy light.

I’ll remember it as sex that was precisely what I should have expected from a half-drunk werewolf. Not to say it wasn’t bad—not at all, and I would never refuse it!—but I’d be lying if every joke and quip Vipir could’ve come up with if he heard wouldn’t have been exactly true.

As I thought, he took no issue with me resting myself directly atop him. He on his back, me lying over him, it must have been dawn before sleep finally took us. Though my eyes had long since gone blurry to tiredness and exertion, I could recognize the expression of serenity that came over Farkas’s face when he drifted off. He was a simple man, able to replace emotional pain with physical labor (of variable definitions). If only my troubles could be so easily erased.

Farkas, dear Farkas. Maybe I was a masochist, holding onto my troubles because I didn’t know who I was without them. Maybe he couldn’t fuck the worry out of me.

But I’d go ahead and let him try. It was best for both of us.

As long as I kept telling myself that, the guilt would subside, and I could sleep somewhat soundly.


	35. In Which She Attends a Funeral

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The conclusion to the Companions Storyline and Brin'a part in it.

They could stop staring any time. I wouldn’t mind it, really.  
  
Tilma was a sweet woman, patient and kind in explaining all the little details about how to serve the Companions, where everything went, how to do my new duties; unfortunately, not everyone here was so welcoming, nor did they afford me any amount of respect. I was worse than a new whelp, a green fighter, or a fresh recruit. I was, as Aela had been first to dub me, a milk-drinking maiden, as unsuited to the warrior’s life as I was to living among the rough folk of Jorrvaskr. My tentative relationship with Farkas, if one could call it that, only added to their generally low opinion of me. More than just a weakling, I was some kind of whore now, also.  
  
The bright side was that no one dared say anything aloud. Sure, I caught more than a few stares in varying shades of derision or lewdness, but anything they might have dared insult me with was silenced with a sidelong glance at Farkas or a meaningful scowl from Aela.  
  
My first few days passed in a blur of tireless activity. There was no rest in taking care of these people, and if I wasn’t cooking enough mammoth meat to feed their massive appetites, I was sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, washing clothes or polishing steel, building fires, replacing oil in lanterns, oh, how the list went on and on! No wonder everyone called Tilma ‘haggard’! How could she have lived so long like this?  
  
All day, I cared for Jorrvaskr and kept the warriors clothed, fed, and clean. I felt like the mother of a den of wolf cubs. Wolf cubs who all hated me. Ugh. By night, I was kept awake with even more activity. I was amazed I could even stay awake after all the hard work I did all day, but Farkas was an even greater mystery. He spent all day fighting, practicing, training, hunting problematic animals or putting down troublesome bandits outside the city. How he wasn’t exhausted by the time we retired to his room, I can’t fathom. How he managed to have enough energy for… well, what he did, I figured had to be because he was a werewolf. There was really no other explanation. It was inhuman. And about the only thing that made life in Ysgramor’s ship worthwhile.  
  
I had a bed and a chest in the shared living quarters, but woke every morning atop Farkas, sprawled over him as though he were the mattress.   
  
Each morning, I watched as his eyes opened and focused on me, going just a bit softer with each passing day. We didn’t talk much. There wasn’t much to talk about. But the mornings we spent in silence, drifting slowly back to the waking world in each other’s arms, filled me with a contented warmth. Jorrvaskr wasn’t my home. Laying naked in Farkas’s bed,  _that_  was as close to home as I would get. And it was all I had.  
  
Four days, I thought, nuzzling a bit closer to Farkas. Four days in this living nightmare, and already my blood turned cold just to imagine getting out of bed and starting that cursed routine over again. If only I could just stay here forever, I mused, running my hand down over Farkas’s broad, furry chest. His eyes were just beginning to flutter open as I did so, cloudy and unrested despite the hours we spent unconscious, the black veins radiating from his dark sockets especially fierce.  
  
Before he even looked awake enough to think straight, his large hand wrapped itself over my waist and slid, as if automatically, up and down my rump. Men. They don’t even need to know where they are or what’s going on to know where the nearest ass is.   
  
“Good morning,” I rasped.  
  
“ _Hmmm?_ ,” he hummed.  
  
I think it was meant to be words, so I answered politely, “Yes.”  
  
“Mm.” The hand on my backside paused a beat, then continued. “Sleep well?”  
  
“I always do.” It was true. The only time I’d enjoyed thus far in Jorrvaskr was the time I spent in this bed. Making love with Farkas was my favorite activity, and sleeping a close second.  
  
As the pain and mourning lifted from Farkas, part of me had expected for his interest in me to subside as well. After all, our first night together, the first night I spent there, had been the result of emotional turmoil. But while that heartbreak in his touches disappeared, it was being rapidly replaced by a tenderness I hadn’t counted on, made manifest in the increasing interest he took in my satisfaction in the evenings.  
  
Again, it was wonderful, though an unmistakable sense of dread filled me as I considered the consequences. If he was falling for me, what if something happened, and I needed to leave again? Would he let me? If I fell for him, would my judgment be clouded?  
  
What did it matter? I thought, catching his earlobe between my lips. Jorrvaskr was an isolated world, a different place. Sometimes I forgot that my beloved city of Whiterun was just outside the doors. No ghost from my past would find me here. I’d spend the rest of my life here. Why not get comfortable, take what little joy I can find? I punctuated the thought with a soft bite.  
  
We were a bit late in getting out of bed that morning.  
  
The warm glow of my skin, the spring in my step, and Farkas’s goofy grin left no illusions to those who saw us come up the stairs together.  Tilma, bless her, didn’t mention how late I was or ask any embarrassing questions, she just handed me tankards of watered ale to pass around for the rising warriors. But those stares… My good mood was drained a little more with every comment whispered under breaths.  
  
I tried to ignore it. What would I do, defend my honor against a sword-wielding fighter twice my size? Though days had passed, tempers still ran high from the all-too recent invasion and murder; I just had to remind myself that it wasn’t personal. They were angry, and they needed someone to take it out on, and the newcomer who didn’t know the pointy end of a dagger made for the perfect target for their otherwise directionless aggression. No matter how I justified it, though, their snide remarks never got easier to stomach.  
  
Besides Farkas, there was one other Companion in attendance who was civil with me. As I bent forward over the table to remove the empty tankard from in front of her, I said, “I haven’t heard anything about my journal since getting here. I’ve been anxious for it back.”  
  
“Didn’t Athis tell you?” she asked.  
  
I blinked back to show that, not only did I hear nothing, I didn’t even know who Athis was.  
  
“Your journal was among the items stolen by the Silver Hand. But don’t worry, Arvid will bring it back with the shards of Wuuthrad.”  
  
Damn, really? I spent the rest of the morning pouting. How many times would my journal get taken? I dreaded to think what might happen if the Thalmor got it, if they knew all the people I loved and places I’d been.  
  
Yet another day of the same routine. Farkas went out to kill a giant that was causing a ruckus, and part of me wanted so badly to ask if I could go. I just wanted to be out, to explore, to feel the fire of magic between my fingertips again! Of course, the Companions didn’t care for magic, and my duties were here in the hall, so I hung back, sighing wistfully as I played with a low charge of static in my hands. They wouldn’t let me so much as light a candle with a lick of flame, or cool their ale with a grip of chill, or mend a cut with a pulse of restorative magic. It was always regarded with derision and maybe even fear. Magic, alchemy, reliance on the arcane, it was all against what they stood for and how they lived. My alchemy set sat, untouched, in the little chest by my unused bed, and even if I could have gotten some brewing in without hearing their jeers, I never would have the time for it between all my other duties.  
  
The door opened to reveal noonday sun and the solid figure of Eorlund Gray-Mane. I’d done a few chores that took my up to the Skyrforge, but I never dared share many words with the accomplished blacksmith. Though he was an older man, he had the body of a rock from his tireless days and nights spent at the brilliant forge. If all the other Companions thought ill of my magic, I imagined the man forging their steel would find me all the more bothersome and out of place, so I made sure to afford the hardened smith as few words as possible, and scurried out of his way as quickly as I could. Now he stood before us with a grim affect, eyes like daggers still bright from the fire.  
  
“I’ve prepared the Skyrforge for the funeral at sundown,” he announced. “I will expect every Companion there to pay respects.”  
  
A solemn nod rippled through the hall, and I watched a warrior or two slip out to inform those out training in the yard.  
  
I was about to slink away to Tilma, to ask what preparations we needed to make, when Eorlund stepped in front of me. “You were the one who was supposed to figure out a cure,” he said. It wasn’t the first time we met, of course, but it was the first time he expressed knowledge of the tragic situation. I nodded uneasily, and he continued, “Very good. You know, he hadn’t been in such a rush. He planned to take it slowly, and to guide the pack to the cure over the course of a few years. It was Arvid who said that you could put it together and find the answer. The timing was unfortunate, but at least he acted quickly enough to get Kodlak’s approval. Don’t let them forget that.” Another nod, but my throat was too tight to answer properly, not that he gave me the chance before continuing. “They should be back soon with the pieces of Ysgramor’s axe. But I need you to fetch one more piece for me. It’s kept in Kodlak’s room. The sooner I can get a feel for the metal, the quicker I can do my part.”  
  
I don’t know why he sent me on a mission he very well could have done himself, one that seemed a little more important than the silly chores I was being sent on until now, but I hurried down the stairs and right to Kodlak’s room.  
  
Instead of the armory I suppose I was expecting, I was met by a collection of old books and scrolls, archaic texts that looked nothing like I’d have expected a leader of werewolf warriors to keep on hand.  
  
I realized as soon as I saw it, that Eorlund had given me the order half to get me to bring him the actual shard of Wuuthrad, and half to subtly give me permission. I’d been too late to talk to Kodlak myself, but I was still on his mission, and here were his notes, his findings, his discoveries until this point. No, I’d never get the chance to talk to the amazing, wise man myself, but I would see his soul to Sovngard still!  
  
Sitting atop the stack of ancient tomes and records, a journal seemed to be waiting for me.  
  
Kodlak’s journal. I heard his voice in my head, the first and only time I would get the opportunity to know him, and I poured over his experiences, his thoughts, his fears.  
  
Perhaps the most striking detail, as I began to read, was Kodlak’s premonitions. Arvid. Before Arvid had even left the city guard or Dragosnreach, Kodlak had known the young Nord would find his way to them. It was both amazing and bone-chilling to see it in writing.  
  
In a dream, he saw the Harbingers in a line, going toward Sovngard, until the Harbinger who made the pact to become a werewolf. From then on, they were led away, into Hircine’s Hunting Grounds. But Kodlak stood my Arvid, a man he did not yet know, and he faced the wolves with sword in hand, ready to fight for the afterlife he had earned. It was beautiful, poetic… and a clue. I marked the page and continued.  
  
 _Arvid shows valor, though, even in this more underhanded time. We have not had cause to speak much, and that is something I deeply regret. I have high hopes for his destiny, as I realized that his appearance in my dream may indeed mark him as the Harbinger to succeed me._  
  
 _I have received few dreams over the course of my life, but when they come, I have learned to trust them. I have also learned to trust the instincts of my heart, which tells me that Arvid can carry the Companions’ legacy as truly as any residing in Jorrvaskr, especially with the loss of Skjor. Aela is too solitary, Vilkas too fiery, and Farkas too kind-hearted. Only Arvid stands as a true warrior who can keep a still mind amidst these burning hearts._  
  
 _I will not speak to him of any of this, though. It is too much to burden another with. My hope is that he and I can keep counsel over the coming years, that I can impart the wisdom of the Harbingers. All things in time. Firstly, I will explain our situation, and the nature of our curse to him, so that he may at least understand this beast blood he has inherited._  
  
Kodlak wasn’t the first to think Arvid was a born leader, I thought. And considering how well the whole persona of a Companion suited him, how he had made this place his home and so well embodied what they stood for, I found myself not at all surprised by how highly Kodlak spoke of him. I knew there was something special about the man, when I healed him on the battlefield, brought him back from the brink of death, and he rewarded me by slaying the dragon with his own hands. If that wasn’t a tale of a young Harbinger, I didn’t know what was.  
  
 _It came as a pleasant surprise that, when I sought out Arvid’s ear, he was looking for me as well, an old, crumpled journal in hand. I explained the nature of our beast blood, and he answered that he knew the weight of the situation to some degree, mentioning that Vilkas had described it as a curse. His enthusiasm was born of that vague warning, and the journal he found. Years before I planned to burden him with the quest to cure us of lycanthropy, he has been inspired by the writing of an old friend to seek out a cure himself. He is convinced that she can help. I admit, I am inclined to trust his judgment, and perhaps she can take my findings thus far and construct a proper cure._  
  
 _I will let him go on this hunt for his friend, but with the aggression of the Silver Hand as of late, I will not let him go alone. May they find the key to our salvation together._  
  
As I closed the journal, I realized that moisture had filled my eyes and slid down my face. I would do this, for this great man, for Arvid, for all these brutish, sloppy, loud, disrespectful Companions! I would heal them.  
  
I poured over the tomes, I dissected the old records, I compared notes and laid out a plan.  
  
A voice at the door startled me a foot into the air. “I don’t suppose you’re  _still_  looking for that fragment?” Eorlund said, looking straight at me as I sat, no axe-piece in sight, surrounded by papers and books.  
  
“I… got a bit distracted,” I answered, wiping some wetness from my cheeks. I hadn’t stopped crying since reading the journal.  
  
He nodded. “You can come back for it, then. I trust you’ve been up to something else of equal importance. In the meantime, the funeral is about to begin.”  
  
Skittering behind him, I made a quick detour to grab my hooded priest robes to hide myself under. There would be people from all over Whiterun there to pay their respects, and I had an identity to hide.  
  
When I arrived at the Skyforge, the ceremony was just getting under way. The crowd was immense. Companions alone took up most of the platform, and what little space was left was filled by the jarl and his court, Sinmir and a small group of guards, Gray-Manes and Battle-Borns, and several others. People I knew. People I loved. I stood, just feet away, hidden under my cloak and hood, eyes lowered, unable to throw my arms around Arcadia or offer Danica so much as hello. That alone renewed my tears. Then the Companions bid Kodlak, the man I never met but respected and missed so painfully, a final farewell, lighting the pyre set in the center of the Skyforge.  
  
Flames and ashes rose into the bright red auroras above, and a brisk breeze whisked the smell of burning flesh from us so that we stood in the growing cold, watching the fire like a vision beyond this world.  
  
“His spirit is departed,” Aela said somberly before the congregation. “Members of the Circle, let us withdraw to the underforge, to grieve our last together.”  
  
Eorlund stopped Arvid with a hand on his shoulder to take a heavy sack full of Wuuthrad pieces from him. Eorlund then caught my gaze and gave me a nod, as though to say,  _hurry now_ , and I swept past the descending Companions and people of Whiterun to get the last piece as promised.  
  
No getting distracted. I dug through his drawers quick as Vex looking for a mark with a guard round the corner. When I found it, I was running back out fast as my leg could carry me, huffing and puffing heavily by the time I made it up to the Skyforge once more.  
  
“Here! The last piece!” I rasped, raising it above my head.  
  
“Very good,” he said, hammering away on his anvil. He stuck the meta into the funeral pyre, making my mouth drop open so suddenly that my jaw popped. “None of that, lass, this isn’t to be disrespectful. It’s got meaning. ‘The fames of a hero can reforge the shattered.’”  
  
“What are you doing?” I asked, teetering forward to pass him the last piece of Wuuthrad. “I thought the plan was to mount it up, all in pieces.”  
  
“Not this time. Tell me, girl, what did you find in those legends?”  
  
Lowering myself to sit at the edge of the forge, I pursed my lips at the question. There was so much history, so many tales, such glory, to put it all into simple words seemed to belittle it. At last, I answered, “We began by breaking the covenant between the Companions and the witches, by taking their heads. Now, they must perform a ritual, to sever ties with Hircine and demand freedom from him. We also need a place to do this in Kodlak’s honor, to free him as well. Ysgramor’s Tomb, they say, is where ‘the souls of the harbingers will heed the call of northern steel.’ It sounds like fanciful nonsense, but I think it’s a powerful place to take a stand, and one where we can call upon Kodlak’s memory. We’ll use the witches’ heads as a symbolic icon for the Companions’ tie to Hircine, and destroy them in the seat of Ysgramor’s glory.”  
  
“Very well. Then it’s a good thing I started on this. Wuuthrad is more than just an artifact, but the key into the tomb.”  
  
“Ah. You… predicted this?”  
  
“Kodlak mentioned a few things here and there. I at least knew that Ysgramor’s Tomb could be significant,” he said over his hammering as he fit the last piece into place.  
  
Watching him work the forge was like watching an artist. Every strike of his hammer rang like music, every dip into the flames made the axe shine beautifully, and in a short time, he held a mighty axe that may as well have been brand new. I held my breath as I admired it, and I think I saw him tugging his lips downward to hide a proud smile. This wasn’t for his ego, after all, but for something far greater.  
  
“Let’s bring this to the Circle,” he said. “Are you prepared to tell them what they must do?”  
  
I nodded eagerly. “Yes. It’ll work. I know it will.” I followed him down to a small, secret chamber beneath the Skyforge, wherein the members of the Circle stood around something like a stone basin.  
  
“That's fine for you. But he wanted to be clean. He wanted to meet Ysgramor and know the glories of Sovngarde. But all that was taken from him,” Vilkas was saying.  
  
“And you avenged him,” Aela impatiently pointed out.  
  
Farkas, who stood dutifully beside his brother, shook his head emphatically. “Kodlak did not care for vengeance.”  
  
“No, Farkas, he didn’t,” Vilkas agreed, his head lowering in shame. “And that’s not what this is about. We should be honoring Kodlak, no matter our thoughts on the blood.”  
  
Carefully, unsure as to whether I should announce my presence or not, I took a step forward. It became many more steps when a firm hand at my back gave a pointed shove, and I all but stumbled into the light where the Circle could see me. “Y-you  _can_. I found the way to cure him, even in death. The Tomb of Ysgramor.”  
  
Arvid shot me with wide, charming smile, teeth all straight, unchipped and accounted for despite his countless battles.  
  
Beside him, Aela gave a short blink at my interruption. “We can't even enter the tomb without Wuuthrad, and it's in pieces, like it has been for a thousand years,” she said.  
  
“And dragons were just stories. And the elves once ruled Skyrim. Just because something is, doesn't mean it must be. The blade is a weapon. A tool. Tools are meant to be broken. And repaired.” Eorlund stepped up behind me, and brandished the legendary axe for all to see. In one pristine piece, like it had never been broken at all, made whole by the flames of Kodlak’s pyre.  
  
Immediately, every Companion broke away from their circular formation around the central basin to rush Eorlund, eyes wide like children. Reaching out to touch the blade, Vilkas said, “Is that…?” He let out a breath of awe. “Did you repair the blade?”  
  
“This is the first time I've had all the pieces, thanks to our Shield-Brother,” Eorlund said with a nod toward Arvid. “The flames of Kodlak have fueled the rebirth of Wuuthrad. And now it will take you to meet him once more in Ysgramor’s Tomb.”  
  
“According to the legends that Kodlak found,” I said, “in the tomb, you’ll find the Flame of the Harbinger. Set the witches’ heads inside, and it will break the magic that binds you to Hircine. You’ll need to face the exorcised wolf spirits that you’ll be taking out of yourselves, but I’m sure that’ll be nothing for a flock of hardened Companions. And, if the stories are true, it should work for Kodlak as well.”  
  
Arvid was laughing, and before I could prepare myself, he picked me up and swung me around in celebration. “Excellent! Wonderful!  _Perfect_! Brina, you’ve outdone yourself!”  
  
All the spinning was making my stomach queasy, but his arms tight around my chest choked me of any pleas to be set to rights. So, without any argument, he continued to whirl me around the underforge while the rest of the Circle talked logistics.  
  
“We have four heads. That’s enough for Kodlak, us, and Arvid,” Farkas said.  
  
“I’ll go with you to the Tomb,” Vilkas said regretfully, “but I won’t go inside. Kodlak was right. I let vengeance rule my heart. I regret nothing of what we did at Driftshade. But I can't go into that sacred place with my heart and mind stained by that pain.”  
  
By now, Arvid let me drop to my feet, and looked right about ready to say something when I patted an anxious hand against his chest. When he glanced to me quizzically, I gestured him closer. “Make sure he goes with you, to the very end! If he wants to me cured, don’t wait!”  
  
“Why not? If he’s not ready—“  
  
“There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be. Everyone is flawed, everyone has their struggles. Kodlak knew that. Make sure he knows it’s not just about him and his sins. He’s accepted for who he is, for all his hot-headedness and vindictiveness. He’s a part of something bigger than himself. Remind him of that, and stay together through the whole tomb. And everyone will have their faults, but if you tell them to, they  _will_ follow you. You’re a leader, Arvid. And no matter what they think they can or can’t handle, if you push them forward, they’ll see it through to the end.”  
  
“How do you know that?”  
  
 _Because you’re their Harbinger_ , I nearly said. I made do with, “You’re strong enough for all of them. Use that strength, alright? That’s all I’m saying.”  
  
If it were brighter, I think I would have seen him blush. The air between us got thicker, and I wondered just what he thought of me now. “Alright… Why is it so important that we cure everyone at once? Are we running out of time to perform the ritual?”  
  
Alduin’s black wings spread across the landscape of my mind, reminding me of the impending doom just over Tamriel’s horizon. “You are. Please, don’t wait.”  
  
He kissed my forehead the same as he always used to. The warmth that spread through me at the touch, the feeling of  _home_  I’d been wishing for for so long, was enough for me to completely ignore Aela glaring a hole through my head. “We leave immediately!” he commanded in the voice of a captian of the guard, of a dragon-slaying hero, of a true Harbinger and he didn’t even know it. “It’s a long road to Ysgramor’s Tomb. And no excuses, Vilkas, you’re coming in with us. Your soul belongs in Sovngarde as much as anyone else’s. We’re in this together, beginning to end, and that’s an order.”  
  
My heart was swelling with pride as I saw Arvid go round the room, smacking shoulders and shaking Vilkas encouragingly. This was his calling. To see someone I cared for and believed in come into his own inspired me. He was capable, proud, incredible. Of course he was the next Harbinger. It fit him better than his Skyforged armor.  
  
So entranced was I that, when his cerulean eyes found me over Aela’s head, I felt myself violently pulled from my musing to stand, confused, unaware of the question he just asked.  
  
“Are you coming?” he said again.  
  
“N… no. I couldn’t go into the Tomb anyway. It’s a sacred place for Companions, and its guardians wouldn’t welcome me,” I said. “But… go on ahead. Good luck, and thank you for letting me stay here.”  
  
At once, his face fell. “You’re not staying?”  
  
A beat later, and Farkas’s smile disappeared, too. He took a step forward, but I stopped him in his tracks with a smile.  
  
“Thank you. Really. I’m glad I was able to help.” I successfully healed Farkas’s broken heart, and I discovered the path to the cure for their lycanthropy. Over all, my stay here had been a success, even if it hadn’t been particularly enjoyable. “But I don’t belong here, and I never will. And that’s no one’s fault, I just… I just can’t spend the rest of my life in a place that isn’t home. But please, don’t let me take this moment away from you! You’re about to do something  _extraordinary!_  And Arvid—I’m  _so_  proud of you! Go on. Give Kodlak the afterlife he deserves.”  
  
At some time, who knew when, Alduin would devour the world. The Kalpa would end, time would be reset, and the cycle would begin again. Seeing Arvid in full bloom, where he belonged, it reminded me of that elusive feeling of completion and purpose that I wouldn’t get in Jorrvaskr. It filled me with envy, it inspired me, and already I was wondering what I could accomplish myself in what little time was left in the world.  
  
Farkas would be alright. He was a strong, handsome man, and surely he’d find a woman who could love him properly, just like Arvid had. Our time together had been brief, fueled by grief, and any budding feelings he had for me would fade from him quicker than his mourning for Kodlak. My short time in his life had been spent helping him cope with his loss, and to linger any longer would do neither of us any good.  
  
And Arvid, he would be  _spectacular_.  
  
I could leave them behind knowing that it was all for the better. There was no pain in walking away from Whiterun this time, no fear, no heartbreak. Just relief to be out of that stupid boat once and for all.


	36. In Which Zeymah Searches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part one of two Zeymah chapters following him on his own wild-goose-chase for his elusive sibling. Hmm, how does that sound familiar?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you may know, Zeymah-dearest isn't the most pleasant guy around. Be advised that, between these two Zeymah chapters, there will be character death, naughty language, and maybe worse.

It was a lesson learned with every scar on his body; every scream that rang in his ears like a sublime mockery of ‘real’ justice; every drop of blood that ran down fingers, clenched in the throes of death; every strangled last breath, whimpered in a desire to form last words but falling flat in one final moment of ultimate disappointment. A lesson learned in every cut, burn, stab he’d ever been on the receiving end of—too many!

 

A lesson that was driven home and made clear with one heart-wrenching realization: destiny was a feeble attempt to validate oneself, but nothing could be promised to anyone beyond a grave.

 

How many years had he dreamt of it, a destiny to be sung of for ages to come? To be known, revered, to save the world like the heroes he grew up admiring? He cared nothing for the people of the world—they were all mere mortals, for truly, even the undead were just waiting to be cut down eventually—but the idea that he could be immortal among the impermanent masses, remembered and honored long after his own inevitable demise, that was enough to keep him awake at night as a boy. And Nirn, beautiful for all its flaws, it would remember him, as though it loved him back.

 

Destiny. It was written in the scrolls. He was written in the scrolls! By the gods, it was his every dream come true! He would save them all. He had the soul of a dragon, and with it, he would put down the Alduin, the World-Eater!

 

And in one fell swoop, his destiny was stolen. The dream ended, and Zeno Valus woke up, angry and cold. Alduin’s invasion existed as a necessary evil, so the grim visions of the future afforded to him by Hermaeus Mora indicated. It would be called Landfall. He watched as Nirn came undone, Lorkhan’s masterpiece unraveled by the avarice of the Altmer, but no matter how he screamed in protest, destiny was stolen.

 

All of them. As though it never happened at all.

 

Alduin has to eat the world. It would steal away everything, yes, but better to be stolen than destroyed. Perhaps their memories, their dreams, their echoes would live on in the Dreamsleeve, or be remembered by the Hist, who existed beyond the Kalpas. Maybe the Daedric Princes, dwelling in Oblivion and only slightly entwined with Akatosh’s madness, would hold onto souls and give them a second chance, if only for their own amusement.

 

Better that than to be extinguished.

 

Of course, one more realization changed that. One more realization instilled in Zeno Valus a new lesson. A realization that changed everything. She was alive. It was all he needed to learn to know the greater truth, the solution. But he could see to that later. For now, he had a Little Sister to find!

 

Draped across the throne, his legs strewn over one arm of the chair while he leaned back, limp, over the other arm, Zeno let his obnoxiously loud sigh announce his presence to Galmar Stone-Fist when he entered the main hall of the Palace of Kings.

 

Galmar bit back what he wanted to greet the egocentric Dragonborn with. For months, they’d been trying to convince the Imperial to side with the rebellion, and showing any contempt or annoyance wouldn’t persuade him. “Dragonborn,” he said curtly instead, “this is an unexpected surprise. I don’t suppose you’re lying on Ulfric’s throne because you plan on joining our cause…”

 

“Hm?” he sighed, glancing sidelong at the Stormcloak general. “Oh, no. Not at all.” If Talos weren’t a Tower holding Mundus together, he’d tell the lot of them to fuck right off. For that reason alone did he give them a pass. “I’m just here because I thought someone here might have heard about a girl I’m looking for. You’re important people. Surely you know the goings-on of the city.”

 

“You came here to gossip? You?” Galmar sneered. “We’re in the midst of war! There are far more important—“

 

“Nothing is more important!” the Dragonborn roared, kicking himself up from the throne to stand tall atop the dais in one swift motion, legs apart, fists clenched. “Together, we ride the flow of time toward an inevitable disaster! Will you speed our destruction? Will you quit yourself of all hope, of all meaning?”

 

“What in Oblivion are you going on abo—“

 

“My Little Sister! Last I heard, she was in Windhelm!” Zeno’s dark eyes went soft. “I beg of you, if you know anything of her whereabouts, I must find her!”

 

The hardened Stormcloak’s next words were stolen away and he stood, as though appalled, for a beat. Who was this man wearing Zeno Valus’s face? “What in Talos’s name--?”

 

“She was the one who caught Calixto,” Zeno continued. Already bored of standing, he plopped backward into the throne once more. “He nearly murdered her and she got out. Surely you know of her! She was last here with two companions, an Imperial jester and a Nord mercenary. Is she still in the city? Is she here in the palace? I expect Ulfric has been treating her as an honored guest!”

 

“The girl who got Calixto caught was your sister?”

 

“She caught him, yes. And yes. Blackish hair, like mine, blackish eyes, like mine. Unbearably adorable. After her heroism, she must have been invited to the palace! Supped with Ulfric, the whole bit! But if he laid a hand on her, he’ll be fighting the elves with one less eye, I warn you.” He flicked a dagger from his belt and balanced it, point-down, on the tip of his gloved fingertip. The curious red and black leather ran up the length of his arm and disappeared beneath common clothes; he must have been wearing full leather armor under his otherwise unassuming attire.

 

Curling his lips beneath his teeth, Galmar wondered how much he could tell Zeno. The matter had been dealt with and all but forgot for months now. The only reminder they’d had that the old man was rotting away in jail had been the ruckus when the guards found him murdered. “As I recall, the girl who alerted the guards to him was escorted to the tavern in the Gray Quarter where she’d been living. That was the last we heard of her.”

 

“She was… staying in a tavern? In the Gray Quarter? Did she get no reward for personally saving every woman in the city?!”

 

On the rare occasions Zeno wandered into the Palace of Kings, Galmar had witnessed a very different kind of man. Most often quiet, eyes always locking onto people to stare through them, like he was determining their worth, he made more than a few guards uneasy with his very presence. Emotion that showed on his face never quite reached his eyes, as though emotion to him were just a mask used to emulate normal folk. Always strange, but too powerful and influential to let his support slip away. And now, emotion that had once been part of a façade at normalcy seeped from him. Anger sent his fingertips twitching, fear for the wellbeing of his sister poured from his usually cold eyes. This sort of sudden transformation in such a force of nature could not bode well for anyone.

 

“No. No one knew she was your sister. No one knew who she was at all.”

 

Zeno bent forward in the throne, groaning something acidic under his breath. Then, he heaved a sigh and pushed himself up. As he walked to the door, he spat, “Keep an eye out for her. If you find her, and keep her here and safe, Ulfric gets my sword arm.”

 

“Did you make the same deal with Tullius in Solitude?” Galmar growled.

 

“Haven’t made it out there yet. Better hope you get her first!”

 

Gray Quarter. That gave a better lead than Zeno dared to hope for, actually. It just so happened a Thieves Guild contact hung around the Gray Quarter in her evenings. Two points of association, two reasons to break into her house and sit waiting for her on her bed.

 

Oh, Niranye! Oblivious to the shadow sitting just a few feet away as she slipped out of her shoes, changed into a nightdress, shook out her hair and—

 

A black and red leather glove clasped her mouth while the other flung around her midsection to restrain her, arms pinned tight against her sides. He kept his dagger in a reverse grip so as not to stab her, but to be very, very visible to his captive.

 

“Niranye,” the Listener whispered into her ear, his voice dampened by the cowl over his face, “I require complete cooperation. Any less will earn you a very slow, very painful death.”

 

Bless her, she knew how to work with the criminal types. No crying, no whimpering, just a nervous nod. The Listener lifted the hand from her mouth.

 

Gasping a grateful breath, she said, “What do you want to know?”

 

“I’m looking for a girl. And Imperial woman. I have a few good reasons to think you know where she is.”

 

For a moment, the Altmer faltered. She swallowed thickly and seemed to be weighing her very limited options. Normally, Zeno would be frustrated not to be given what he wanted immediately; however, knowing that the woman was holding her tongue no doubt to protect the subject of their concern saved the shopkeeper from getting stabbed then and there. “You mean your sister?” she answered simply.

 

The Listener tried to ignore the pang of disappointment he felt at how easily Niranye knew who he was. Then again, this wasn’t the first time he’d shown himself into her house or greeted her in exactly this manner. At least this time he hadn’t helped himself to her food while he waited for her to come home, or accidentally killed her cat, nor did he break the hinges off of her door. All things considered, he was being quite the courteous guest this time around. “Is she in the city?”

 

“No.”

 

“When you say former member, are you referring to them trying to kill her?” The Markarth innkeeper had mentioned something very briefly about it. “What happened?”

 

He could practically hear the gears turning in her head like a Dwemer puzzle, trying to click together the right answer to get her out of this mess as quickly as possible, and preferably in one piece. “I just know the stories I’ve heard from them.”

 

“Tell me every word of it. Everything you know, every breath of gossip. If I find out you’ve left out a single detail, I’m taking your tongue.”

 

By Sithis, the stories she had to tell! Long after his arms began to ache from holding her against him, she finally ran out of gossip to repeat. The only thing stopping Zeno from going straight to Riften to set the whole fucking city on fire again was the fact that he still had a sister somewhere out there who needed him. Strangling his building fury, he growled, “So they chased her out? Where did she go?”

 

“After that? She went to Dawnstar to become a priest of Mara, I heard.”

 

“Dawnstar!” he hissed, letting go of Niranye and rushing for the door.

 

“Wait, that was weeks ago! Last I heard she was headed for—“the door slammed shut before she finished, “Whiterun. No wonder those damn fools can never find each other!”

 

***

 

Another tension headache, on the verge of a migraine. His head pulsed painfully, and he could only be thankful that the Sanctuary was so dark. At his behest, even the fire in their little hearth in the common room was extinguished. Not caring that the blood on his hands would stain his face, he pressed his fingertips against his forehead and rubbed his temples with his thumbs to leave perfect little circles of red across his face.

 

“Listener?” Babette’s sweet girlish voice asked.

 

“Yes, Baby Sister?” he asked, and she bristled at the nickname as always. Despite his painful headache, he was quick to look up at give her his full attention, eyes eager, if clouded by pain.

 

When he first joined them in Falkreath, it had thrown all the women off how excited he was to say he had sisters. He would call out for them, scream “Sister!” from across the Sanctuary just to see who would answer, and refer to them only as such, often with a strange little grin on his face as he did. Babette especially received particularly unnerving attention. The Listener confessed eventually that he had an actual blood sister, whom he loved above all other people, and to have sisters again reminded him of her. To be given a child sister with her hands always in something alchemical only excited him further. Sometimes she wondered if he ever cared about any of them at all, or just the illusion that they were somehow connected to his birth sister.

 

“If he gets off on it, let him,” Astrid had told the Falkreath Sanctuary once. “Whatever keeps him loyal.”

 

Oh, but the look in his eyes when he had to kill Astrid. So satisfied, elated, but devastated at the same time. Loyal indeed. It messed with his mind.

 

“If you’re done with that old priest, do you mind if I feed on him? I haven’t been out to eat in days.” She fluttered her lashes. No, she certainly didn’t care for being the Listener’s ‘Baby Sister,’ but playing it up never failed to give her whatever she wanted.

 

He shrugged and dropped his head to the table. “If you’re not above slurping what’s left of him off the floor, be my guest.”

 

“Ah… I take it he didn’t talk?”

 

“Not a word!”

 

“You don’t suppose he didn’t actually know anything?”

 

“He knew something…” the Listener growled. He clasped the top of his head in his hands and squeezed.

 

Breathing through her teeth, Babette sat herself beside the Listener. For a moment, she mulled over how to say what she was thinking without drawing out her leader’s rage. “I would think you’d be happy. Wouldn’t you be furious if he sold her out? If he handed your sister’s life over to a Dark Brotherhood assassin?”

 

Another groan against the table. “I would have killed him that much sooner.”

 

“Knowing you, you’d have gotten so mad, you’d have killed him for betraying her before he even said anything useful.”

 

“I know…”

 

“If her friends were true, they won’t tell you her whereabouts if they think it spells danger for her. You need to play nicely.”

 

 

A longer, more frustrated groan. Then, with a shove against the table, Zeno pulled himself up and started for the stairs.

 

“Listener?”

 

“I’m going to Riften. Maybe the priests there have seen her. If not, I still have a score to settle with the thieves… Teach them to turn on my Little Sister…”

 

He pulled a loose tunic over his head to conceal the conspicuous design of Brotherhood leathers, and was stepping into trousers on his way up the stairs, hopping his way up to the massive iron door.

 

When it swung forward, Zeno flinched against the white light of sun reflecting from snow, piercing his headache like a knife… only to open his eyes a moment too late.

 

The jester stood directly before him when he opened his eyes. The rabid Imperial smiled wickedly. “Listener! Oh, yes, it’s Cicer—“

 

It was half reflex, half spite that drove Zeno’s already-bloody fist into Cicero’s jaw. Knocked to the Listener’s feet, Cicero choked on a laugh. “Sweet Cicero is here to serve! Mother needs… tendin—“The poor fool was cut off once again, this time by a boot that came down squarely on his stomach. “Blaargh! Li-i-stener!”

 

“It’s so fucking good for you that you got here after I got most of my anger out on the last poor sod who knew my Little Sister,” Zeno said. He pressed his heel downward to show that there still remained a fair amount of unvented aggression. “Where is she? And better yet, why in all the planes of every fucking Oblivion did you bring her into the Sanctuary and use her as a human shield?”

 

“Cicero never did any such thing! No, no, never, ever, ever!”

 

“And then you stayed with her? Clung to her like a tumor? Why would you think you’d be worthy of her? You were her ‘brother,’ they said! Brother! Who the fuck do you think you are, nearly getting her killed and then taking her from me?! Well, you can’t have her, and if you ever so much as harmed a hair on her head…!”

 

Gloved hands took hold on Zeno’s leg and in one motion, twisted and pushed, knocking the Listener backward. Cicero rolled out to the side and knelt, drawing his dagger to put the blade between him and the enraged killer. “Cicero,” he began, speaking very slowly, like talking to a madman, “loved her. Very, very much. He never hurt her—to do so would break the tenets. She is a Sister. Everyone’s Sister. When he took her into the Sanctuary, it was only to protect her from Astrid’s damnable sheepdog!”

 

As long as she was indeed the blood sister of the Listener, Zeno mused, perhaps that was the case. He would want, even expect, that all the other members of the Brotherhood would treat her with the respect that she deserved. “Alright. You get a pass on that one. So, where is she?”

 

Dawnstar got colder. Unbearably cold, frigid, as the air between them thickened and their stares on one another turned pained.

 

“Where is she?” he asked again. Why was Cicero not saying anything? Why was he staring with such big, sad eyes?! Zeno’s heart raced and knees went weak to the image of every worst-case scenario playing in his mind.

 

“Our sweet Little Sister… she’s somewhere. Alive, last Cicero saw her,” he relented at last. “But he knows not where. Cicero had to leave. Had to come back to Mother. And our Little Sister, she could not come with, you see.”

 

“Where?”

 

“She could be anywhere by now! High Rock, perhaps?”

 

“For fuck’s sake, Cicero, where is she?! Where did you see her last?!”

 

“He cannot say!” he shrieked at last. Then, eyes wide at his own outburst, the jester threw both hands over his mouth.

 

Swallowing the impulse to shout Cicero into a stain against the Sanctuary door, Zeno whispered, “Why not?”

 

“She… she never said why! But Cicero promised! He promised her, he would tell no one of her whereabouts! No one, no one, no one at all!”

 

“I can torture it out of you,” Zeno warned. “I have a body in the basement to prove what I’m capable of. Or that I should have to. You’re disobeying the tenets by not telling me. Do you want to invoke the wrath of Sithis?”

 

“Oh, Cicero knows!” he spat back, still on his knees in front of the door. For his prone position, however, he did not appear the least bit afraid. In fact, with every word, Cicero’s resolve seemed to strengthen. His eyes, always flickering through emotions too quick to follow, danced with feelings on the passionate end of the spectrum. “Listener loves to make others bleed! Hoo-hoo! But Cicero won’t talk! No, no, not this time, not one word! Cicero will take Little Sister’s secrets to the grave! Mother forgives him!”

 

Zeno sighed. There was no luck with any of them, was there? Anyone who might potentially know her whereabouts seemed to care too much about her to give anything away. Infinitely frustrating, but as Babette pointed out, certainly for the better. “Fine. You just… get in there. See to the Night Mother. I’ll be back, hopefully with my Sister.”

 

“Do… you think that’s wise?” Cicero asked as he picked himself up from the icy ground.

 

“No. I don’t. But the greatest crime I’ve ever committed was in leaving her alone. It’ll plague my soul far worse than any murder, theft, rape or assault ever could. When I find her, no matter what, I’ll never let her be alone again.” He smiled grimly. “But remember, if I don’t have her when I get back, I’ll be asking you some more questions. And I’ll expect answers.”

 

Babette was right. Murdering everyone who knew her wouldn’t get him any closer. He’d play nice for now, but as soon as he knew for a certainty that it wouldn’t pay off, oh, there would be blood…

 

***

 

“Hold him down!”

 

“What are you waiting for?! Shove the rag in his mouth!”

 

“What if he blows my hand off?!”

 

“He’ll blow everything to bits if you don’t just—“

 

“Give it to me! I’ll do it!”

 

“Fus--”

 

“Shit!”

 

“Get back!”

 

“Ro Dah!”

 

“Good job keeping a hold on him, you two! Brynjolf called out, balling the booze-soaked bar rag in his hand and prying the Dragonborn’s mouth open. When he finally set the gag inside of the young Imperial’s mouth, Vex moved in behind him to loop a belt over his face, securing the rag into his jaw and locking it all in place with a quick fastening of the buckle behind his head.

 

Cynric and Dirge kept Zeno’s arms locked behind him until they could be properly secured as well, but by the time he was finally restrained, the Sleeping Tree Sap on the rag already kicked in. They led him to a chair, which he dropped back into with eyes wide and pupils dilated.

 

“Well, what did you expect to happen?” Kynvind grumbled. “You lot tried to kill his sister.”

 

Over a chorus of, “Shut the fuck up, Kyn,” Brynjolf said, “No, no, the lass is right. We all knew this day would come. Didn’t expect it to play out like this, but we knew there would be consequences for turning on our own, especially if Zeno ever caught wind of it.”

 

Those not adding extra belts and ropes to Zeno moved about the Flagon to pick up broken pieces of furniture and shattered bottles. A few unfortunate thieves sat to tend to their wounds. Miraculously, the most extreme were bruises, scrapes, and a few sprains. Thrynn had the worst of it. His eye swelled and turned purple where Zeno’s fist collided with it, and in the Flagon, he’d been the very wrong one to try to stand between Zeno and Dirge. For that mistake, he earned himself a nasty gash on his shoulder that he began to stitch shut with some thread from behind the bar.

 

“I never hurt her. Doesn’t mean shit to him,” Thrynn snapped, pulling the thick needle through his skin. Damn, they really needed to have supplies for sewing people closed, and not just clothing! What was this shit, twine?

 

“You did a lot of other things to her, though!” Vipir chuckled. He tossed a mangled piece of wood into the reservoir. “Zeno giving you that black eye was the least surprising thing to happen all day!”

 

“What do you mean?” Kynvind asked as she bent over Thrynn to take the needle from his hands. Though she was no better than he was at this sort of thing, she at least had the advantage of not having either eye swollen shut. “I thought you were friends with her. But if you did something to her to deserved this…” She poked a bit deeper than necessary.

 

Zeno moaned something into the gag and tilted his head back against the chair. Cynric pushed the Dragonborn’s head back downward, and his whole body slumped forward and swayed to the left.

 

“Oh, come on, Kyn. Don’t tell me you don’t know about—“Rune began helpfully.

 

“Not another word,” Vex hissed like a cat. “We don’t have enough Tree Sap to put down another rampage.”

 

“Don’t know what?” growled Kyn.

 

“Holy shit, Vex, come on! We can’t not tell her! Look how red her face is getting!” Vipir complained. “She might combust!”

 

“Can this please wait until she doesn’t have a needle next to my throat?” said Thrynn.

 

The congregation seemed split between those who were done with the excitement and demanding the two talk it out in private, and the camp who all sat around eagerly, waiting for the tempestuous pair to come to blows.

 

“He slept with my Sister!” Zeno barked at last.

 

Every pair of shocked eyes turned to the Dragonborn, and the chewed-through strap of leather and wet rag at his feet.

 

It took a few moments for Delvin to finally break the stunned silence, “How’d the bloody maniac manage that?”

 

Zeno was still reeling from the drug, but he continued to sputter, “He went and fucked my poor, innocent Baby Sister, and then you pieces of shit tried to murder her…! I’ll fucking kill… all… of… Hhhhhgggggkkkkk…”

 

“Did… did the lad just fall asleep?”

 

Brynjolf began to cross the Flagon for Zeno, lips twisted in concern, when his path was abruptly blocked by Kynvind, who darted past him toward the door to the Ratway. She was shrieking something about ‘leading her on,’ and ‘replacements,’ and ‘completely undeserving of her love,’ while Thrynn followed right on her heels, hollering about all the things she didn’t know and wouldn’t understand. They disappeared into the sewers together, their shouts echoing through the undercity for several minutes.

 

“Get the lad cleaned up,” Brynjolf ordered. “And put him somewhere safe. I’ll talk to him when he wakes up.”

 

“Do you trust him not to try to kill us again?” Vex asked, Nightingale gloves clenching and unclenching uneasily.

 

The Guild Master nodded. “I’m the only one who wouldn’t be on his supposed ‘hit list,’ since I stuck up for the lass, and didn’t lay a finger on her. Assuming he doesn’t have any other vendettas on his mind, I should be able to reason with him. I have a feeling there’s a bit more to this than just a slight against his family.”

 

***

 

An exception to the ‘play nice’ rule had to be made. There was just no getting around it; the woman was as insufferable as her mother, and she left him no choice. The Listener wiped his blade clean on Ingun’s dress, shaking his head. She was cute, too. She even reminded him of the Little Sister he had tried so very hard to get information about, with her curly dark hair and fingers stained by flower petals. But, alas, not only did she know absolutely nothing, but in her clawing and pushing and fighting (he wasn't even hurting her yet; it was completely uncalled for, really!), she had pulled down the cowl concealing his face. Poor thing. If she’d proven worth sparing, he might have cut her some kind of deal, blackmailed her and left it at that.

 

But then she had to go and be a cunt about it! People these days!

 

Nothing. No receipts regarding the alleged potion sale she’d had with Little Sister, no notes on any of the alchemical discussions they’d supposedly had. This was the hard part of going on nothing but hear-say, he thought to himself as he set his cowl back to rights. So very little to go off of, and very little to gain even if things did go smoothly. Hopefully Little Sister wouldn’t be upset that he was killing so many of her acquaintances.

 

What did this make? Two? Was it only two so far? Oh, well, two’s not so bad!

 

He’d almost made it out of the house when he heard a sound behind him. In the doorway, moonlight cast his shadow across her, and he saw the Black-Briar matron herself sneering at him with nettle. “Did you come about the contract?”

 

The Listener shrugged halfheartedly. “Well, someone’s contract,” he said, and he let the door swing shut behind him with a scream of the hinges. Whatever, she didn't need to know it was personal. It would be best if they just assumed it had been a contract put on the poor girl. Less confusion that way.

 

***

 

In a rare moment of peace, almost the entire family sat at home in the Sanctuary. The only one missing was the Listener himself, and he’d been missing for a couple weeks now. When he returned, there would no doubt be a host of new contracts to be assigned and acted upon, but for now, everyone was afforded a bit of time to practice, relax, and make their new Sanctuary feel more like a home.

 

Babette had her poison garden blooming in full-force, while the Night Mother’s coffin remained in impeccable condition despite being on display. New recruits found their stride among the veteran members. Everything started to look more and more like a respectable Sanctuary to make the former generations proud.

 

The stained glass Sithis burst open with a gust of icy air. The Listener dove in, muttering something under his breath. No words exchanged, no hellos, he went directly to the coffin of their matron, stood before her and tapped his foot impatiently for a few minutes, and came back to the common area, snapping his fingers for attention.

 

“You,” he said, pointing at the new young female recruit with dark circles under her eyes, “you’re going to the Imperial camp in the Rift to kill their quartermaster. You, you’re going to Morthal to kill an orc mill worker. Baby Sister, you’re going to Solitude to kill that seamstress bitch. I don’t know which sister’s which, so be a dear and kill them both.” Then, leaning over the table, his dark eyes grew solemn, and the air in the Sanctuary hung heavy around them. “And wherever you go, I want you to take a good, long, careful look for any indication of my Little Sister. She’s out there, somewhere, and the lack of word or leads… it doesn't bode well. I don’t like it one bit. So check for gossip, and follow any leads. If you bring back a good clue, you get a new set of armor. Bring back my Sister, and you’ll get a set of dragon bone weapons, whatever you want. Alright? And, before I forget…” His attention turned on the jester hovering at the back of the room. “Cicero. In my room. Now. I have a few questions.”

 

Damn him and the proud, stubborn look on his stupid little face! The redhead even pursed his lips, nose crinkled in defiance. No amount of torture would make Cicero break. He was already far past broken, a shattered little man. There could be no persuading him.

 

“You realize that you’re blatantly disobeying the third tenet,” the Listener warned as he shut the door to his bedroom. Better lit than most of their dungeon home, it still carried all the gloom and aura of malevolence as the rest of the Sanctuary. The prizes of countless murders decorated his desk and shelves, mementos as much as trophies

 

Cicero muttered something under his breath, turning his face down to the desk behind him. Leaning against it, fingers curled over its edge, Zeno could hear his knuckles pop from the pressure of his grip.

 

“What was that? I couldn’t hear you.”

 

“Shhdffbnnnlssnrrr…”

 

“Cicero, what are you saying? I order you to tell me—“

 

“She should have been the Listener!” he screeched suddenly, knocking the desk back with the force of his flailing arms. “She was supposed to be chosen! Little Sister! Cicero can’t tell you her secrets because she ordered him not to! And her orders trump those of the lesser Listener, the Listener who was never meant to be!!”

 

“Wh…” No one could leave Zeno speechless quite like Cicero, he’d give the raving lunatic that much. “What in all the fucks are you talking about? My Little Sister could never be…!”

 

“She was supposed to be! It was fate! But Cicero ruined it, ruined everything!! He told her not to come with him to Falkreath, not to follow him to take Mother to her new home! She asked, she begged—she was so lonesome! And when Cicero looked at her, he saw himself, broken, sad little Cicero looking back! All alone, all her family dead or missing, and she just wanted life to go back to normal! How was I to know she was being beckoned by our Unholy Matron?! How was loyal, devoted Cicero to know that he was depriving Mother of her Listener? But then, she spoke! She spoke to you, because you, you, you were the closest she could get to Little Sister, Little Listener! If only Cicero hadn’t turned her away! She would be the Listener now! The rightful Listener!!”

 

Cicero was in the midst of an all-out tantrum, screaming and kicking and turning over furniture, while Zeno… well, he could barely wrap his head around the very idea that Little sister could possibly be… “Uh, alright. We can… agree to disagree on that one,” he said as his chair bounced along the stone floor past him. It at least explained how he justified not indulging any of Little Sister’s secrets. And, frankly, he’d heard the fanatical zealot spout worse nonsense. “Calm down! Whatever the case may be, I am the Listener, and I demand respect! Now, if you won’t tell me where my Little Sister is—“

 

“Absolutely not! Never! You could tear Cicero’s tongue out, and he wouldn’t tell you a single—“

 

“—let’s try a different approach.”

 

Cicero’s brows knit curiously. And at last, he stopped destroying the leader’s room to stand perfectly still, listening to his unworthy Listener.

 

“I trust she didn’t order you not to tell me where I can find this Olev fellow, did she?” Zeno asked, a feline smile spreading across his lips before Cicero even said a word. He already knew the clown’s answer. And finally, Zeno had a solid lead again!


	37. Zeymah's Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zeymah's side-story's conclusion, in which he spends some quality time with a few of the men who most affected Brina's life and takes destiny into his own hands once again.

Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could still see the lines and circles burnt into his corneas by the brilliance of the Elder Scroll. It stayed with him, those symbols he could make no sense of, as precious in his memory as the drawings he and his Little Sister drew into the mud as children. Some would take it from him, that destiny that he’d always known he was born for—but to take away that future meant taking away the past spent preparing and praying for this. And the past refused to leave him. It was all the sign he needed.

It all came back to the Kalpas, really. And the more he thought about it, the better the decision felt, the easier he could breathe.

His Little sister believed in him from the very beginning, from the time he was scribbling pretend Elder Scrolls in the dirt with a stick. He could well imagine what her response to knowing the world would end ought to be; she would tell him that letting Alduin win was the right way, the real answer. But she was here, she was in Skyrim, looking for him, and he couldn’t help but reimagine the scenario, this time talking to the little girl who always believed in him, who always believed the stories.

 _You can do it, Big Brother!_ The uncynical, innocent child would have said. _You can do anything! You’re a hero, just like I always knew you would be!_

“And what about the Thalmor? What about the end of the world?” Zeno whispered to the dying campfire.

 _The Elder Scrolls are full of prophecy, and they told you to save the world from Alduin, not to save it from the Thalmor,_ the imaginary child answered from across the campsite. _Let another hero save the world next time! And just like you grew up hearing stories about Cyrus and the Champion of Cyrodiil, whoever beats the Thalmor will grow up hearing stories about the Dragonborn. And then, it’ll be your image in his imagination, you’ll be the inspiration! Won’t that be incredible?_

That’s what she would say, not the girl who grew up, but the girl who helped his love for old stories fester into a wanderlust, who inspired him to leave home and never come back until he had glory to his name!

And besides, Zeno thought, laying back to use the Ogma Infinitum as a pillow, there were uncountable Kalpas! Even the trans-Kalpa Hist lost track! And that was that, in the end. That was the last bit he needed to feel confident that what the Little Sister in his thoughts told him was right.

By morning, it was with a pleased smile that Zeno rode across the last stretch of the Reach to Markarth. What a beautiful city! Reaching up from the stone, carved from the cliffs themselves, a masterpiece wrought from the Dwemer’s defiance against nature! And then, the humans took it over in the wake of their disappearance, like the vultures they are. Since then, the streets have run red with blood of Reachmen and Nords alike in the ongoing squabbles that all mortals inevitably succumb to, and will continue until they all kill each other and the city is once again abandoned. It will be a never-ending cycle of death and renewal, a testament to the nature of life. It was poetic, really. Even the most celebrated Imperial bard, Crassius Curio himself, could not have written it better.

 

Eight bodies left in his wake since Rorikstead alone, and he slept like a baby. A bag weighed down with ill-gotten goods sat on his shoulders, and yet none of that weight came down on his conscience. Only one crime ever pained him, that crime he committed against that sweet little girl back home, and he was close, so very close to making amends to her! And once that was done, once he saw her beautiful smile again and knew she was safe, he would save the world. For her, just like he said he would when he slew pretend-daedra in her name a lifetime ago.

Markarth understood him. Cold stone, bloody history, bloody future, filled with conflicting voices who only agreed on one thing: blood was the best answer. It’s a simple fact, proven over and over again, that the easiest solution is probably best. A dagger in the throat was consistently easier than having to talk sense into a man, just as a threat against family could persuade anyone easier than a bribe. Such was Zeno’s tried-and-true methodology. Breaking the habit, fighting his instinct, proved difficult.

One of the guards opened the door for him without question, without thought, without the slightest concern for what sort of danger they were once again unleashing upon their city. Zeno flashed him a charming smile. Only those who really looked close ever saw that the emotion reflecting in his eyes never quite looked right, that the crinkles at the corners of his eyes were too practiced, too deliberate. “I’ve actually come to town seeking out one Olev, son of Maret,” he said to the brawny Nord. “Do you know where I could find him?”

“Aye, he lives on the north side of town,” the guard answered gregariously. “But if you’re here to hire him, you’re a bit too late. Good Maret passed, you see.”

Oh, the strong-looking Nord woman from the inn was dead? It’s the only thing anyone can count on, really, the one piece of news no one should ever be shocked to hear. Still, he turned down his lips and lowered his eyes, nodding just once to show grim understanding. Again, it was an expert recreation of a proper expression of respectful sympathy, a perfect show to all but the most perceptive observers. Galmar Stone-Fist had a way of seeing through him, for example, and Zeno never once could fool Brynjolf of Riften. But these fools, guards and common folk, oh they just nodded along and took every stupid gesture at face value!

So, the mercenary called it quits out of reverence for his dead mother, eh? Cute… And, loathe as Zeno was to admit, he almost… _empathized_ with the scoundrel! It was a strange thing, to understand another person so well—to understand another person at all! But the pain of his own loss was fresh in his mind, and as he thought of Olev’s dead mother, he couldn’t help but think of his own.

The north side of town? It wasn’t very specific, but Zeno prattled about the residential district, exploring the different doors carved into the cliff face and questioning guards as we went.

A child’s scream indicated the home. On the second row of houses, up on the narrow walk overlooking the river, four children chased each other. They squealed and squawked, but paid no heed to the tall, handsome Imperial man who sauntered toward them until he stepped right between two boys in the midst of play. “Do any of you know where Olev, son of Mar—“

The youngest of the children smacked right against Zeno’s leg and bounced back, twisting awkwardly with his fall. For one heart-stopping moment, all of his siblings shrieked and reached out uselessly as they watched their littlest brother fall backward over the ledge.

“ _ **Fus!**_ ” The push of air was just enough to catch the small body and send it sailing across the gap between cliffs instead of downward. The little boy flew like a kite for just a moment, flailing against the sudden absence of gravity. It almost wasn’t enough distance. But from the opposing cliff side, reaching out from just under the stone walk way was a juniper tree. The branches snagged the child’s clothes like dozens of skeletal hands that held the boy aloft. If he were any bigger, the twigs would all snap. Only the fact that he was scared too witless to move saved him from wriggling free of its frail grip.

“ _ **Wuld Nah Kest!**_ ” This time, it was Zeno carried across the gap, though in a far more controlled, direct push of air from the soles of his feet. He landed on the other side, right beside the juniper tree, and it was with a scolding shake that he tore the sobbing child free. “I could have let you die, you know. Don’t be such a fucking dimwit next time, and watch where you’re going! You could have splattered on the ground, and it would have been your fault entirely.” He set the boy back to rights on his feet, but before he let go of the child’s narrow shoulders, he grumbled, “Can you stand? Your knees are shaking. I’m letting go of you. For fuck’s sake, stop crying. You lived, didn’t you? What else do you want?”

When he removed his hands, the little boy fell away from the ledge, onto his rump where he proceeded to cry.

“Damn it, stop crying!” He pulled his pack from over his shoulder and dug into it. “Here—look, a dragon scale! See, neatest fucking thing you’ve ever seen, right? You stop crying and I’ll give it to you.”

“I—I c—can’t!”

By now, two of his siblings were scrambling across the little bridge. The third disappeared briefly through one large bronze door and reemerged with what Zeno immediately identified as some sort of human ballista of a man. Even from far away, he could clearly see that half of the man’s face was scarlet.

“Of course you can. Hold your breath. That’ll stop the sobbing. Now look up. Look up at the clouds. Count them. And just focus on them. If you have something to hit or occupy your hands with, that’ll help even more. Don’t use your sisters. It’s easy, right? I’m surprised you don’t already know this. Nord boys can’t be allowed to cry! You’ll need to remember that if you ever want anyone to take you seriously when you grow up. Here, take your scale. Now scram, before the guards think I was doing anything to you—“

 

“This is why I tell you kids not to play up here! What’s this about getting stuck in trees and nearly falling?” the huge man demanded. Tawny hair with matching stubble, huge muscles showing through common clothes, he looked like anything but a babysitter. As he crossed the narrow bridge, Zeno could see that what he’d thought was a tattoo or war paint was in fact a huge, jagged scar.

_Oh!_

“He didn’t just fall! The man yelled at him, and he flew!” the oldest of the pack said, a little girl with icy blue eyes and soft brown hair to match the big man on her heels.

“Yelled?” Olev asked. Then his eyes met the dark, expectant smirk of the Imperial man kneeling in front of his youngest brother, then to the gleaming scale in the boy’s hands. “Everyone, inside.”

“But it’s not even close to dinner!”

“We still have hours left to play!”

“Inside!” the mercenary barked.

Olev was not a big brother to disobey. The moment his voice was raised, all the kids bolted back for their home across the ravine.

“Do the stories precede me?” Zeno asked.

“You shouted my brother across the streets, and gave him a dragon scale. I can put two and two together.”

“And yet, you told them to go home! That’s a shame; don’t you think they’d want to meet the Dragonborn? Hear stories, invite me to dinner?”

“Not likely. Thank you for your help.” Olev turned away only to stop dead in his tracks at the cold leather gauntlet that closed around his wrist.

“Olev, son of Maret, I came an awful long way just to talk to you! Come now, why don’t we go grab an ale somewhere. My treat! In fact…” His smile widened, and he had to remember not to let it turn manic. “Why don’t you grab my Little Sister, and we can all catch up together!”

Somehow, Olev managed to get taller. He loomed over the Dragonborn, red scar burning bright on his face to match the heat of his glower. “Don’t know what you’re talki—“

“She’s with you, isn’t she? Isn’t she?”

“Get out of here, Dragonborn.”

“Tell me where she is and why Cicero was so afraid for her?!”

That did it. The color drained from the scar and Olev’s eyes narrowed. “If you hurt him, I’ll kill you.”

“Bold words from a common mercenary to the legendary Dovahkiin!” Zeno laughed outright.

“From the best fighter in Markarth to the dog who killed the emperor’s cousin at her own wedding.”

“Oh, is that the game we’re playing?” The widening smile across Zeno’s face made Olev take an involuntary step backward. “Because if so, oh, I’ll play!”

“Get yourself to a priest, Dragonborn. Your mind is ill,” Olev said. He tore his wrist out from Zeno’s grasp and turned back to follow the children back home. He kept his voice even despite the way his skin visibly crawled, or how his eye twitched in an instinctive pull to escape the dangerous man.

Ugh. He was just no fun at all. Zeno followed right on Olev’s heels, hissing, “Well, if she’s not with you, where is she? I thought she’d still at least be with one of you! At least tell me if she’s alright! Damn it, stop trying to walk away! You don’t have to tell me where she is, I can keep looking on my own. But you were with her, and you heard about all the shit that happened to her.”

The mercenary slowed his pace and cast a glance over his shoulder, lip curled in a snarl.

“I just want to know what happened to her. If she’s alright. What she’s up against. I’m not going to stop looking for her just because you won’t tell me, but at least give me this much. She’s the only family I have left,” Zeno pleaded.

For a moment, the grisly Nord just glared down at the Dragonborn. It was only after several seconds of thought that he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders heavily. “If I couldn’t tell by looking at you that you were her brother that does it. I must have heard a dozen speeches like it from her own lips.” Before the elated grin could spread across the Imperial’s mouth, Olev held a firm hand in the air between them. “You’re not coming in my home. And you’re not going near my family. The resemblance is cute, but you need to get out of here before I snap your neck.”

He didn’t know how long the Imperial rambled on, standing in front of him, redirecting his path, pleading for just a chance to talk, just a few minutes of his time, please, he didn’t understand how _important_ this was! But by the Nine, Zeno was relentless, and before Olev knew it, he was sitting in a corner of the Silverblood Inn with Zeno handing him a fresh mug of ale from the bar.

The victorious grin on his face was unmistakable. Black eyes sparkled with a life he didn’t often feel, and his chest thundered with equal parts excitement and nervousness. This man knew so much about his sister. What had happened to her, where she was, if she was alright. This man had the answers to give Zeno hope, or to break his heart. This was the conversation he’d been itching for since learning of his Little Sister’s presence in Skyrim in this very inn!

“Last you saw her, was she well?” Zeno asked eagerly, leaning in like a child waiting for an exciting story.

Olev nodded slowly, still bewildered at how Zeno had managed to get him here in the first place. “She was... Well, she’s had one serious injury since I’ve known her. Snapped her leg pretty bad a while back. She can’t move very fast for very long, but otherwise, she’s healthy. Completely obsessed with potions and remedies; I think even Peryite would be shocked if she caught so much as a cold.”

Zeno bent even closer in his seat, and Olev leaned back. Much closer, and he’d be coming in for a kiss!

“She’s fine, though.”

“Good. Good! That’s at least… good.” Zeno ran his tongue over his lips. “And… where is she now?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“But—but that’s not fair, I bought your ale!”

“It was a generous gift. Thanks.”

“Damn it, just—where is she? What do you want? Gold? Power?”

Olev laughed into his mug. “You won’t buy my loyalty. And, before you say it, you won’t intimidate me, either. I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone where she is, and also that I wouldn’t kill you. I don’t intend to go back on either of those.”

The Dragonborn blinked and straightened in his chair. “Why would you make that promise?”

“Because when I first met her, I was after a bounty on your head. She convinced me not to pursue you. And I’m sure if we got into it, she’d be just as devastated.”

“I—okay, that’s interesting, but that wasn’t the part—I mean, why would you promise not to tell anyone where she is? No one’s telling me this part! Is she in danger? Why can’t I know where she is? If I found her, I could protect her!”

Zeno watched for every twitch of emotion. A twist of the Nord’s lips, already gnarled by the glaring red scar across his face; the lowering of his brows; the downward cast of his eyes. It struck something in Zeno’s chest to watch it. At last, the Dragonborn rasped, “You… you don’t even know, do you?”

“She wouldn’t tell anyone what the Thalmor said to her. I think she was afraid of what we would think of it. Maybe she thought we wouldn’t believe her. But no, she never told anyone, far as I know. All I know is that the Thalmor are looking for her, and if she sees you again, it’ll end the world. And the Thalmor are counting on it. They’re trying to find her to make sure that whatever would happen, does.” He took a heavy drink from his mug, and Zeno noted the way he clamped his eyes shut with the swallow. “I was worried. Thought she’d kill herself. I really did. When I had to come home for my family, I wasn’t sure I could leave her. She even offered to come with me to Markarth, and were it not for the Thalmor all over the city, I’d have taken her in a heartbeat.”

“It would… end the world?” Zeno repeated, eyes going wide. “That Thalmor she talked to… did she mention his name? Was it Lovicano?”

“Crazed Scholar was all she called him.”

“Yes. That would be Lovicano… should have killed him! I’m always hearing, ‘you should kill people less, Zeno, you’ll regret it!’ But the only time I ever regret is when I leave them alive…” And instant later and his annoyed visage replaced itself with a wicked smile. “It makes no difference. I made my decision the moment I heard that my parents were dead and my sister is out there looking for me. The only thing me being apart from her accomplishes is that it leaves her vulnerable to the Thalmor.”

To Zeno’s frustration, however, Olev did not appear the least bit moved by his declaration! Instead, the mercenary set his mug down on the arm of his chair and leveled a grim glare Zeno’s way. “This is a ploy. You don’t know shit, and you’re just trying to get me to tell you where she is.”

“Not at all! Want proof? Knowing crazy old Lovicano, he told her that the world’s going to end because if I see her, I’ll feel the need to protect her from the most immediate danger: Alduin. And that’ll serve the Thalmor’s purposes. But—“he held up his index finger demonstratively, “—what he’s forgetting, what everyone forgetting, is that the Scrolls say a lot more. There’s more to the symphony of Nirn that’s yet to be sung, and there are still heroes waiting for their cue. It’s not up to me to stop them.”

“So, what you’re saying is…?”

Zeno practically sang, “I’m saying, it’s not my problem.” He reached across to take Olev’s mug from his chair, and helped himself to a sip of the ale within. “I’m going to defeat Alduin. And I’m going to find my sister, too. And no one’s going to stop me, least of all crazy old Lovicano. In fact… Say, do you know where he might be? I might just ask Ondolemar, but I don’t like the way he looks at me. Like he’s undressing me with his eyes, but worse… Like, he’s really, _really_ undressing me. Skin and all. I don’t care to be on the receiving end of such a fate.”

“He was being held prisoner in Whiterun when we crossed him,” Olev said, snatching the mug back.

“Whiterun? Really? For fuck’s sake, when I was there, the guards wouldn’t tell me shit! I could have saved so much time and energy if they just told me something useful for once!”

A chortle escaped Olev’s scarred lips. “They promised her, too. Not to tell you anything.”

“She had the entire city guard on her side?” Zeno asked. Now it was his turn to be amazed.

“She has the entire _city_ on her side,” Olev corrected. “She’s an incredible girl…”

“Yeah…” Zeno’s smile softened to something wistful, and his eyes looked to something far away. One hand reached out, and whether it was to take the mug back for another drink, or to clasp Olev’s hand, the mercenary didn’t care to find out. He gave the mug up willingly to avoid the latter possibility. “She always has been. Absolutely incredible. I can’t believe what I did to her.”

“Where does the list start?” Olev asked blandly.

“I mean—what I did to her is the worst! The worst crime against the best person!”

“The…” A dark cloud crossed Olev’s features, and for a moment, he looked like he might strike Zeno outright. “The _worst_ crime? What _did_ you do to her?” Was this why she had such a complex over him? A need to protect him, to adore him no matter what? Had she been somehow scarred in her childhood, victim to him in some way her fragile mind refused to remember?

“I left her alone,” Zeno whispered, ashamed.

“Ah.” Olev relaxed, shaking his head to dislodge all the horrid possibilities he’d imagined. “So when you say worst…”

“Oh, it’s nothing to dismiss! It really is the worst! I mean, think of it this way: murder is easily the most excusable crime there is—“

“You’ve lost me already. How do you figure--?”

“Just—think about it! Death is the one inevitable fate. Everyone dies. Everyone knows that they will die. No surprises. Even those who obtain undeath are really just holding off the inevitable until some enemy of another destroys whatever binds them to the mortal world. We all die. When you wake up, you think, ‘one day, I will die.’”

“I can guarantee you that no one thinks about that first thing every time they wake up.”

“So,” Zeno continued, ignoring Olev’s commentary, “what’s so bad about murder? Nothing! It’s something that we’ve all always counted on! And people bitch about how people are ‘taken too soon’ – bullshit! For all anyone knows, they could have died an hour later choking on their own fucking _spit_! It’s inevitable! Now, other crimes, they can get worse. No one looks at their most prized possession and thinks, ‘one day, this will be stolen from me.’ No one prepares for that, and it’s not inevitable. That is a legitimate crime. Never stopped me, because possessions are petty and who gives a fuck, but I at least understand why people get upset. And no one thinks, ‘one day, I’ll get raped’—“

“If you say, ‘never stopped me,’ again, I’m going to punch your teeth out—“

“My point still stands! You see where I’m coming from, right? I mean, the rules obviously change when people _deserve_ to be stolen from, or assaulted, or what have you, but—“

“I can’t believe your idea of justice is based around what crimes people expect and how much they deserve it in your personal opinion—“

“Quit interrupting! You’re missing the point!” Zeno settled down and set his face in a somber affect. “My sweet, precious, perfect Little Sister never thought, ‘one day, my family will die, I will be left to bury them, I will be all alone, I will be evicted, I will have no home or family, and I will suffer.’ Over anything I’ve done to anyone else… putting her through that is the worst.”

“That’s… a shockingly noble thought,” Olev admitted with a shrug. “But, you don’t give her enough credit. She’s handled it well. When she’s not being an absolute idiot, she’s pretty smart. And she’s tough. She’s done well for herself, and survived some dangerous situations. She’s not a child anymore.”

“She’ll always be my Baby Sist—“

“No. She won’t. She hasn’t been a baby in a long, long time. She’s befriended assassins and thieves, and lived among them. She’s killed people. Never enjoyed it, of course, but she’s shed blood. She’s gotten drunk and gotten close with Daedra. She’s stolen. She’s bribed. She’s a long way from being _innocent_. But she’s done all these things to survive, and she deserves credit for how well she’s grown up without you.”

For a moment, Zeno couldn’t speak. He slipped downward in his chair, body liquefying somewhat at Olev’s heartfelt tirade. “I… I can’t believe it…!”

“What, that’s she’s an adult who—“

“No! Fuck no! That you would think I love her for _not_ being a thief, or _not_ being a killer, or _not_ being an adult! What kind of monster only loves people based on how many people they have or haven’t killed?! If it’s not unconditional, it’s not _love_!”

Olev’s mouth pursed. “You’ve lost me again.”

“I love her because all my fondest memories include her! Because she inspired me to go on my adventure, to find my destiny, and for as long as I could remember, she believed in me! She’s my blood, and the dearest friend I ever had! So what if she’s had to break a few bones, end a few lives, steal a few baubles? Who hasn’t? Besides, between the two of us,” he paused to flash Olev a cheerful wink, “she’ll _always_ be the innocent one!”

Three mugs of ale later and Olev was clapping Zeno on the shoulder as he stood. “I should get back. The older kids can hold the place together well enough for a while, but give them long enough and it’ll be war.”

“What do you mean?” Zeno asked, very nearly standing up with the Nord despite having still half a tankard left to drink.

“You know. Brothers and sisters, they always fight. If I’m not home soon, they might tear each other apart.”

“What?! Why would they do that?!”

For what felt like the hundredth time that evening, Olev threw Zeno a puzzled tilt of his head. “Don’t tell me—you and Brina _never_ fought as kids?”

Zeno’s horrified gasp in response was answer enough on its own. “I’d never fight her! Why would I ever want that?!”

“I shouldn’t be surprised. Anyway, take care. And when you find Brina, don’t tell her I told you any of that. Also, don’t tell her that I told you to check to the south, or that I parted with her at Helgen and told her to go east through the mountains from there.”

Zeno’s thrilled face gave Olev just enough warning to dodge the attempted embrace. “Thank you!” he sang. “Thank you, thank you! I won’t forget this!” Olev was turning for the door when Zeno called out, “Wait! I just have to ask…”

The mercenary turned, a brow raised suspiciously.

“You… and my sister… and the way you talk about her… Were you in love with her?”

“Psh, Stone-Cat? No. Of course not. Definitely… definitely not! I wouldn’t be caught dead with any less than a Stormcloak Nord woman with a sword on her hip! She’s the furthest thing from that! So… no. Not in the least.”

“That’s what your brother said, too, but I just had to be sure. It really would have been a bother to end the night by cutting your hands off!”

***

“Time is cyclical. Repeating, on and on, over and over, maybe a little different each time, maybe entirely changed, maybe perfectly the same. Over and over, Kalpa after Kalpa. Alduin eats the world, and it begins again, on and on. Until it stops. But how may Kalpas have you tried? How many times have the Thalmor, or some iteration of them, sought to bring an end to the cycle? It’ll happen, eventually. You have infinite chances, so I should damn well hope that at least once in infinity you can actually get your shit together and _do it_.

“But you’ve failed until now, haven’t you? For Kalpas uncounted, eternities replayed over and over again, and you’ve failed every time! I think, considering your record, an infinite number of attempts and an infinite number of failures, I like my chances that this is just another fuck-up waiting to happen. It’s practically guaranteed.”

Zeno twisted the dagger, smiling softly at the rivulet of blood that dribbled down the Lovicano’s chin.

“So, until the next Kalpa, this is farewell! Do be a dear and scream for me next time around, will you? All this quiet, peaceful death shit is really underwhelming.”

He left the body on the cold stone floor of the dungeon, and even left the dragonbone dagger sticking straight up from his gut for all to see. As he passed the guard outside the cell, he flipped and extra Septim into the air to add to his sizable initial bribe. “If anyone asks, you can tell them whatever story keeps you out of trouble. Thanks for being a good sport.”

***

He couldn’t have slept even if he wanted to. For hours upon hours, he rode relentlessly to make up for his detour to Whiterun. Thankfully, Shadowmere showed no signs of stopping, and long after Zeno grew weary, the otherworldly horse kept right on going. Through the forest, into the mountains, oh, how grateful Zeno was to have a horse that could run on such uneven terrain without fear of injury, and could go without need of food or rest! They were careening out of the mountain pass with the same ferocity that they set out of Markarth with!

Supposedly Jorun, the female Dark Brotherhood recruit, would be around here in the Rift, looking for clues as well. But the Rift was a huge place, Zeno thought, slowing to a trot as he took the time to look more carefully at his surroundings. She was probably combing through Riften, and he’d heard strange rumors on the winds between here and Markarth regarding someone in the western Rift. Something about a spirit healer with remarkable potions. It made his heart skip a beat to imagine it might be her!

Helgen swarmed with bandits. The passes echoed emptily, devoid of life. The Rift was the most likely place to find someone roaming about, and maybe, just maybe, it would be her.

The Rift in summertime smelled of fresh plant life with warm, musky undertones of fertile loam. Pine thrushes skittered and hopped along the forest floor for food, occasionally fluttering overhead in pretty little dances to the sad songs they sung in a mournful chorus.

For a moments, the sounds of birds singing died, and the forest went perfectly still, until the eerie serenity was shattered by an explosion in the distance that echoed through the trees and sent little brown birds clamoring through the foliage in terrified flurries. Bunnies raced past him, and even a fox or two bounded from the thicket to escape whatever ruckus was going on. Zeno lid from Shadowmere’s silken saddle and crept through the brush. It didn’t matter what conflict he was about to impose himself on—the sounds and smell of sulfur was too promising to ignore!

Nestled in a copse of birch trees, an unassuming little shack was alive with Vigilants and Thalmor alike. Unfortunately, the action had passed, and Zeno looked on in disappointment at the fleeing priests. The Thalmor, however, remained a few minutes, bemoaning the interruption and the failure of their ‘investigation.’

“There’s simply nothing to be found!” a familiar voice huffed. Ah, he remembered that voice! A haughty little upstart Justiciar, who wanted so badly to rub elbows with the higher-ups, work her way through the ranks with favors and alliances rather than hard work for the Dominion. Oh, yes, he remembered her. He nearly ruined her career through the course of a single party gone deliciously wrong! That night also marked the first time he ever met Lovicano. What was her name again? He could only ever remember the first half of it…

Staying off the road, he followed the green-eyed Justiciar and her lackeys a short distance, quickly grew bored of hearing her bitch about her ruined robes and dead-end investigation, and doubled back to the scene of the battle.

Alas, dead end was right. An alchemy table at first got Zeno’s hopes up, but they were quickly dashed by the extensive poison garden behind the shack. Brina wouldn’t have planted those sorts of things in her garden, especially if she was the famed healing spirit going around curing travelers all the time. Probably just some hedge witch or old researcher, Zeno decided. He slid in through the blasted-off back door of the shack, but alas, nothing else of any note. A few potions, which he pocketed, and a couple interesting whatsits that might fetch a decent price. Oh, a butterfly. Cute. He’d give that to Baby Sister back at the Sanctuary. Even some food, which was a good thing, because Zeno’s stomach had been rumbling since morning!

It was all for naught. He cut through the forest, taking Shadowmere on a shortcut along the jagged foothills that he once took during that period when he frequented High Hrothgar. It felt like a lifetime ago.

He took his time traveling through the Rift and slowly up through Eastmarch, and then the Pale, listening to every breath of gossip, asking questions as he went, but none of it gave him the answers he was looking for. And, without any more lead to go off of, he simply continued on his way to the Sanctuary, compromising his goal of finding his sister with the responsibilities of the quest bestowed upon him by the Scrolls.

The Black Door hung in the rocky outcropping, the skull staring through him and into the Void. Blood upon the door remained and slick and shiny as the day it was bled.

“What is life’s greatest illusion?” it asked him ominously.

For a moment, Zeno just enjoyed the sensation of that low voice reverberating through his bones. Then, his mouth twisted into a sardonic smile and he whispered against the cold metal, “ _Innocence_ , my brother.”

The door screamed. Already gathered in the entrance, attracted by the sound of his arrival, Nazir stood with his arms crossed, his smooth russet skin etched by new wrinkles. “Jorun is dead,” he said in lieu of a proper greeting. “She completed her contract, but was attacked by some Thalmor outside of Whiterun. Made it back here, but the journey was too hard on her injuries, and she died within hours of getting home.”

“That’s a shame,” Zeno sighed, surprising even himself at how much he meant it. He wouldn’t lose any sleep over the loss, but to lose a sister still stung. “Have you already paid respects and bid her soul farewell?”

“It was a few days ago, and we weren’t sure when you’d come back, so yes. And a shame is an understatement. She was damn good with a knife, and we don’t exactly have the numbers to make any recruits terribly expendable at the moment. We need more murderers.”

“Alright… We’ll start looking for some new blades.”

“But we also thought you should know, she apparently had a lead. She couldn’t say much, and we could hardly understand what she could manage, but she mentioned a journal, and that it was lost in Whiterun Hold. She speculated that the Thalmor stole it during their battle.”

He didn’t have much time, of course. He’d already wasted too much. Months spent neglecting the World-Eater; it couldn’t go on any more! All of his duties as Listener were attended as quickly as he could so that he could retire to his room, get a few hours of sleep, and prepare for his next journey.

The Elder Scroll. Beautiful. For all the time he’d left it here, it hadn’t gathered any dust. Zeno swept his hand over the brilliant metal casing, something like gold and silver, but entirely different. For too long, it had sat on this shelf, alone in the darkness of the Dawnstar Sanctuary. But at last, it would see the light of day, and Zeno, shining in the glory of his destiny! It was just like he always imagined, the childhood game of pretend that Little Sister believed in as much as any of the chapel priests’ sermons.

He kept goodbyes short and simple. Leaving people behind came easily to Zeno. But after ruffling up Baby Sister’s hair and patting Nazir on the shoulder, Zeno cast Cicero a smirk.

“No farewells for you, jester,” he said. “Do what you need for Mother’s tending, then meet me at the inn. You’re coming with me.”

“Humble Cicero lives to serve,” the Keeper answered suspiciously, but offered no outright protests.

“Leaving so soon?” Nazir asked. “The Thieves Guild has been trying to get in contact with you. They’re so fed up with you not answering their letters, one of their elite members is on her way to talk to you directly. Something about a contract.”

“Just take care of it,” Zeno called over his shoulder.

He gathered supplies for the road and sipped some mead whilst waiting for the Keeper to join him.

As commanded, Cicero skipped into the inn a couple of hours later. “Are we off to kill someone?” he asked jovially.

“Alduin!” Zeno answered. Despite himself, the excitement was beginning to boil over. He was going to do it! He was going to complete an Elder Scroll prophecy! He was going to be a _hero!_ Landfall be damned, Thalmor be damned, his dreams were coming true! All he was missing was his Little Sister to cheer him on. A Brother would have to do for now, and perhaps, if they did cross Brina, the presence of her old traveling companion would inspire trust.

And traveling with Cicero was lots of fun, he had to admit. The singing, the dancing, it wasn't how Zeno normally spent time on the road, but it made for an excellent distraction. So distracted by a particularly enjoyable song that the jester led, as they walked south toward High Hrothgar, past the abandoned Loerius Farm, he never even thought to look twice at the little priest with a limp, bundled tight and obscured by her golden robes, and he certainly did not catch sight of the sly little wink Cicero tossed her way as she hurried past them to the north.


	38. In Which She Joins the College

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our heroine wanders up north to Winterhold, where surely nothing will ruin her good time. After all, it's not like there are any Thalmor in the Colle--

I can’t do justice to the pain of this particular fall. I’d fallen from buildings, from city walls, from waterfalls, through the floors of broken towers, and even off the city of Riften. But none of those crashes hurt me as bad as plummeting from elation to terror in one heart-breaking moment.

Cicero! My beloved, wonderful Cicero! I heard his voice first, singing loud in the distance. Then I saw him, dancing down the road! He was coming back for me! We’d pick right up where we left off, Cicero and his Little Listener, us against the world!

And then I saw who walked with him.

Everything about him was the same as before, from the proud posture and graceful movements down to the deliberate shift of his body with every step. Peeking from underneath common clothing, slick black and red leather reflected no sunlight, as though his body were sheathed in the Void itself. His shroud was covered by a linen hood that served no purpose other than obscuring the telltale design of the hood he wore. A familiar sword hung at his hip, the pommel catching the midday sun to wink tauntingly at me. Walking death.

The Listener.

Of course Cicero would be out and about with the Listener! He went home. _This_ was his family now—who was I kidding, it always had been his family! I had no place to interfere, and wouldn’t want to anyway. I couldn’t glance sideways at the living embodiment of murder without my blood going cold in my veins. My pace quickened, face lowered, hood pulled forward. If I didn’t get the impression that running or casting an invisibility spell would ignite some hunter instinct to chase me, I would have bolted as quickly as I could. But the image of him following after me like a hungry wolf killed that impulse as surely as he would have killed me.

Maybe even Cicero had forgotten me. His dream fulfilled, family restored, who was I to him but an old diversion? Just as I passed by, I dared to look to my surrogate brother, just to see if he even looked my way.

Amber eyes flickered through a gamut of emotions, but his smiling mouth, singing some inane song at the top of his lungs, held fast to a mirthful expression. It was all a joke to him, the prancing little idiot, like it didn’t matter one bit that the man he danced beside had nearly murdered him only months before!

I offered Cicero just the slightest nod, but I wouldn’t dare draw attention to myself in front of the emissary of the Night Mother. And, quickly as I could limp, I hobbled up the road until Ciceros’ joyful vibrato faded into the cold distance.

At least he was happy. The family that he longed for, the life he yearned for, it had all been restored with no hard feelings. My heart burst for my beloved fool, but every step came slower as the renewed sense of solitude set in. Jorrvaskr was no home to me, but I would miss what little companionship I was leaving behind. Aela’s small gestures of approval, my nights spent with Farkas, Arvid’s unconditional friendship, I would miss them terribly. I was back to being a hermit, it seemed. But perhaps not all was lost. They said my brother was once in Winterhold, but it seemed that he hadn’t been seen there since. And no, the College didn’t have any great interest in alchemy, but in all other subjects of the mind, it was the place to be. I could learn some knew tricks, expand my understandings of magic, and maybe find myself among like-minded folk. I could find a home there, maybe even friendship or love!

Maybe all this time in Skyrim had been leading up to this, my real destiny. With the Mage’s Guild dissolved as long as I’d been alive, maybe I just never thought about something like this being my life’s purpose. But what’s more isolated than a ruined city on the edge of the sea? Brother would never find me there!

I swear, the northern half of Skyrim doesn’t understand that there are seasons! Already, any hint that it had been summer was slipping away to the wrath of autumn. Wind hit me relentlessly, pushing and pulling me across the slush-slickened roads. When my cloak wasn’t getting caught by the breeze and sending me flying like a kite, I was slipping and dropping directly on my rump or knees. Kyne must have been laughing at me—but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to annoy that particular Divine.

A few errant mages, some wolves, a highwayman. These things would have broken me before, stopped me dead in my tracks. But what had once been the most dangerous part of traveling now paled in comparison to the wind! I dealt with every attacker swiftly in a flurries of ashless fire and spears of ice. As my rations dwindled, I felt less and less shame at rifling through packs of fallen highwaymen for food. A lifetime had passed since I last walked this particular road, but I recognized with ease the outcropping of rock where I’d been approached by my first ill-intended bandit. It served as my first battlefield, and the grave of the first man to stand at the wrong end of my flames. How I hated myself for taking his life! How disgusted I was to take food from his corpse, rather than leave it to scavenging wolves! Part of me mourned for that innocence; part of me awed at how I’d managed to survive at all as such quixotic fool.

Even more incredible was how any place could be so impossibly cold! What was Winterhold like in the wintertime?! By the time I made it out of the jagged mountains and could see the sea in all its brilliance, I was too frozen over to care how incredible the view was. This was no shining sapphire ocean like I’d seen in Cyrodiil. No, this was a tumultuous expanse of angry silver, scattered with white icebergs that stood out against the rough water’s surface like daggers. Above, black clouds promised a thunderstorm for the ages.

Night fell before I got into the wreckage of the city. Shivering violently, I couldn’t go to the College just yet. No, I needed a meal, and a fire, and a warm bed before I would bother with any of the tests they would supposedly put me through. I shuffled into the small inn and tried to ignore the grumbles about “more damn mages.” Fantastic, so not even the locals living beside the College of Winterhold liked mages. Despite the animosity, I was allowed to rent a room and pay for a bowl of stew with my meager funds. I suppose I should have expected, being so far north, that they would be serving horker. How could anyone tell where the meat began and the blubber ended? All that made my bowl of jiggly slop edible was the overpowering seasoning and mouth-puckering salt. Gods, but some mead would have made it infinitely easier to choke down! My entire meal I fought the temptation to order a drink, just one drink, it wouldn’t be so bad and I only needed one!

“Here to join the College?” a low, melodic voice asked beside me. I turned to discover an Altmer, tall and golden, at the other end of the bench. The hearth at the center of the inn turned his High Elf skin a peculiar rose shade, and glimmered off his yellow eyes like twin citrine gems. “Of course you are—not much reason to be in this town otherwise.”

“Are you a College mage?” I asked, taking in the dust-colored mage robes he wore.

“No. Gods no, not for years. I left Winterhold for some time, and returned to stay here at the inn,” he explained. “I still have research that keeps me busy, and being here in Winterhold ensures I have access to former colleagues.”

“Ah… If I may ask, why did you leave? It’s not a bad place to live, is it?” I could already hear the pain building on the fringes of my words. “I’m sort of running out of options for places to go…”

“Oh, it’s quite alright. My dismissal was based more around… some experiments that garnered unexpected results.”

“You were a liability?”

“Visionary, more like, but call it what you will—they did,” he said. Water under the bridge, apparently, since the subject didn’t appear to ruffle him. “Experimentation is part of the process, you know. I could hardly call myself a scholar if I did nothing to expand our understanding of Aetherial arts. Don’t let them smother your curiosity. No matter how they feel about the things you set on fire.”

“I won’t be setting many things on fire,” I admitted with a laugh. So, this was what talking to a fellow mage felt like! For once not being judged, but being _encouraged!_ “I’m far more interested in the Restoration school.”

I tried not to be discouraged by how his face fell. Ah, my first taste of wizard elitism! “Ah. Well, then, I suppose you won’t be doing much in the vein of experimentation. At least you won’t need to fear expulsion.”

“I was planning on trying to cut my leg open and perform a sort of magical surgery on myself. Reconstructing the bone, mostly. I figured the College would be the best place to try something like that. Mages on hand to keep me conscious and to prevent me from bleeding out in case I can’t hold out all the way through. You don’t think they’d reprimand me for something like that?”

My new friend bit his lip. “That… might just do it, actually. It’s interesting, I’ve never met a healer with… _moxie._ ”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

He tapped a long, bony finger to his lips, and I fought not to be distracted by how shiny his nails were. Like glass! Were all Altmer hands like that? How had I never noticed that before? Maybe it was the light of the fire playing tricks. Maybe he used some sort of lacquer. Where would he get lacquer in a desolate city like this? Or was it a result of a diet of horker fat? Would eating more of it make me shiny, too? Maybe, in that case, there was some merit to the wiggly, goopy sludge. His hair looked very soft and shiny, too. If horker fat could make my hair shiny and sleek, I’d order another bowl!

“If the College doesn’t suit you, as it very well may not,” the mage said, pulling my mind out from its wandering tangent, “you might consider finding the Face Sculptor. Rumor has it she’s set up shop in Riften.”

My skin crawled at the macabre mental image the title painted. “Face Sculptor?”

“She is a Restoration mage by the name of Galathil. She reconstructs the faces of her clients. Takes them apart, pieces them back together. If your leg experiment works out according to your calculations and expectations, perhaps you might see if she would take an apprentice. A more… hands-on application of the Restoration school deserves further study, and I dare say that the current authority on healing in the College has done very little to expand the art. While most would even argue that Restoration is hardly an art at all, myself usually among them, even I must admit that your proposed application is intriguing.”

Fascinating! Someone was out there actually taking faces apart and healing them into something different? To call it ‘intriguing’ wasn’t giving it near enough credit! I wondered how well I could delve into that practice on my own with the resources provided by the College? I began to imagine the possibilities: healing grievous internal wounds, correcting misaligned bones and joints, changing faces with as much ease as changing clothes… Could I change my own appearance? Did I dare to break the bones in my face to reshape them into something new?

I could change my bone structure, my complexion… perhaps even my eyes! I could change my name, and walk right back into Cyrodiil without anyone knowing who I was. Maybe I’d move to Markarth and stay with Olev and his family! I’d start a new life, as a new person!

But I’d need to start here, to get the training the College had to offer. I would start with my leg, the procedure I needed, and take on bigger projects with higher stakes as I grew more comfortable with the dangerous craft.

“What’s your name?” I asked, the hopeful smile spreading across my lips.

“Nelacar, at your service,” he answered, a small smile twisting his small lips. “And yours?”

It was an easy question. The easiest question. But I couldn’t very well say Brina, since I was still intending to be some sort of hermit, and my nickname since going into hiding, Spirit of the Rift, just made me sound like a lunatic to say aloud. What could I name myself? Ideally it would be something sentimental or at least meaningful, but it felt soppy and even a bit presumptuous to name myself after someone else. Part of me wanted to go by the name of someone I admired or loved, like Arcadia or Anoria, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

“Lenka,” I blurted out at last. It wasn’t terribly meaningful, just a family name. I think my aunt and a few grandmothers had it, but it was nothing obvious enough to be traced back to me or my identity.

“Lenka, good luck to you in your endeavors at the College. I don’t usually involve myself with applicants, but…” His narrow mouth flashed a smile that might have been charming. “You know where to find me if you require any assistance with your research.”

“Thank you!” Though I couldn’t tell how much of that was a courtesy and how much was a real offer, maybe this was a sign that I actually could make proper friends here in Winterhold! Maybe the College is what I was really meant for!

I stayed up later than I intended talking to him about his own studies, mostly in the Destruction school. When I finally did make it to bed, my head was buzzing with so many ideas and thoughts that I couldn’t fall asleep anyway! I don’t know how late I slept in; the sky in Winterhold is only ever grey, it turns out.

The dilapidated little city couldn't compare to the College. No, nothing compared to it! Jorrvaskr was just a stupid boat, and the Sanctuary was just a stupid cave, and the cistern was just a stupid sewer; but this, _this was extraordinary!_ A stone fortress of knowledge rising up from the fallen ruins, with a bridge that defied gravity and pillars of light promising a glimpse into the heart of Magnus himself, I felt my pace picking up without even intending it. I never considered myself a scholar. My study of magic began with necessity and expanded from there. In Cyrodiil, the Mage’s Guild had long dissolved for many generations. That would have been where a fledgling mage learned their art, rather than zapping wolves on the road like I did. And, while Cyrodiil did have the Synod and the College of Whispers, I hardly would have considered joining either. They were well-known to be very political and aristocratic, organizations that a young farm girl never would have gotten into.

But the massive structure made me imagine a different path for myself. Maybe it fooled me into thinking I was a scholar, or at least, was always meant to be. How anything so grand, so moving, could not be destined for me? And sure, it was just grey stone to match the grey sky and the grey city and the grey sea, but those flashes of blue magicka, visible to me even in town, promised so much more!

Standing at the very front of the imposing bridge was a tall, golden Altmer woman. Her sweetroll-colored hair bound in twintails, her glassy eyes staring vacantly into the lazily drifting snow, she looked bored more than anything else. As I approached, she regarded me first with just the slightest of glances—then, as I continued her way, she focused on me more intently and even pulled herself up from the half-lean she’d taken against the nearest column.

“Cross the bridge at your own peril!” she began dramatically, a stark contrast to the disinterested attitude she’d sported before noticing me. “The way is dangerous, and the gate will not open. You shall not gain entry!”

Not the warm welcome I’d been hoping for. “Is the College not accepting new students?” I asked, already feeling my enthusiasm disappear like water pouring from a punctured skin.

“So, you want to join the College? I am here to deter those who would seek to do harm to our institution and members, and to assist those seeking wisdom of the College.”

 _Could have fooled me with a greeting like that,_ I thought. I held my tongue and nodded along.

“What is it you expect to find here?” she asked.

What could I say? A home? A new life? Friends to make me forget everyone I’ve had to leave behind, a lover to erase Thrynn’s rumbling laughs from my memory? If I was being honest, what I hoped to find in the College extended so far beyond books and studies.

“I have nothing,” I admitted at last. “If anything awaits me in this school, anything at all, it will be all I could hope for.”

I can’t tell if she was trying not to roll her eyes, or simply unsure what to make of my pathetic whining. At last, she said, “Well, not just anyone is allowed inside. Those who enter must show some degree of skill with magic.”

I suppose I didn’t mention magic at all in my plea, did I? I rubbed my nose self-consciously to hide the flush across my cheeks. “Well, yes, I can cast magic. Of course I can… What I mean is… I’m a mage, and I hoped that in the College, with other mages, I can find a place where I belong. I can hold my own with Destruction, I’ve been able to rely on Illusion spells with excellent results, and I’m adept in Restoration. And, if it helps, I’m very skilled in the alchemical arts.”

I figured that was enough. Surely, with a list of talents like that, I was sure to be allowed entrance—

“A small test, if you will.”

“I—um, alright. I suppose if you won’t take my word for it. Like I said, I’m really very good with—“

“The Flame Atronach is a vital companion for anyone relying on Conjuration. Summoning one here would certainly show your skill.”

 _Oh, for Mara’s sake!_ “I really try not to dabble in anything Daedric. Not to say I don’t respect the school, but can’t I show you a different spell? Maybe a firebolt or…?

“If you think you’re capable of it, I can provide you with the spell for a mere thirty gold.”

“Thirty gold?! I-I don’t have that kind of money! Can’t I please just show you another spell? Lightning, healing, an illusion, an ice storm, _anything_? I really am a mage, I swear!”

I could hear the annoyance in her sigh, but with a little wave of admittance, I released my own sigh of relief. Then, I focused heat into my hands, shot it on a little archaic symbol carved into the stone, and set it aflame. The magical fire did not need fuel, it just burned from the stone as if the bridge were made of wood, staying to a controlled area of about three feet across. While it burned. I pulled a potion from my bandolier, shook it demonstratively, and poured the contents into my mouth. The Altmer stepped forward, about to stop me as I stepped into the flames, but I spun around and looked back at her, unharmed by my fire. “There. A firebolt with persistent flames, and a potion to protect against fire. I could have walked into this with a ward, and been equally unharmed. Or, if you’re still not convinced, I could just set myself right on fire and keep a stream of healing magicka so strong that it wouldn’t even singe my hair—“

“Alright! Yes, very impressive,” she relented hastily. “I really don’t need to see any more. And the Archmage certainly doesn’t need to see someone setting themselves aflame on our doorstep, so I’ll ask you to end your demonstration before anyone sees this display of yours!”

So I’d gone a bit overboard. Conjuration is overrated anyway. Nothing good ever comes of getting mixed up with Daedric summoning, especially if one makes a habit of it. But my righteous attitude dissolved the more I realized how frustrated the gatekeeper was. She started across the bridge, waving me along behind her, and I followed with my head lowered, feeling like the bratty child I was.

“Once we’re inside, you’ll want to speak with Mirabelle Ervine,” she was saying over her shoulder.

“Yes, miss,” I answered dutifully, hopefully showing that I really could be obedient and not wholly troublesome.

My tour was brief and to the point. The master wizard, a tawny Breton lady, was pulled from some task or another to show me around, and I could tell her mind was elsewhere the whole time, though she never made me to feel unimportant. In fact, though her attention was clearly pulled in various directions, her voice always trailing off as she made some mental note or another to herself, she did pause to thank me for finding the College and wanting to pursue study.

Standing me before the statue of some gallant mage, Master Wizard Mirabelle offered me a genuine smile that creased her hazel eyes. “I think you will fit in rather well here,” she said, and I sighed in relief at the encouragement. “You will be free to study and experiment as you desire, as long as you adhere to the basic guidelines and rules of the school. Mostly, clean up after yourself, be responsible for the damage you may cause, and do not cause harm to other students or townsfolk, and you’ll be just fine.”

“Who should I talk to about training in Restoration?” I asked eagerly.

“Ah, that would be Collette. She may be… _difficult_ to get along with, but she is very knowledgeable in the subject. In fact, I imagine she’ll be beside herself with glee to have a dedicated Restoration mage in the College other than just her. But it’s getting late.”

Was it? Had we really spent all day touring the school? Time had flown by! Suddenly, I realized how honored I should have been that the Master Wizard spent her whole day to make me feel at home! Of course, the tour alone wouldn’t set the layout of the school in my mind; it was so massive, I’d be getting lost for days. But I could see this place as my home, could see myself warming myself every night by the tingly blue fires or reading old books in flickering candlelight and steady magelights.

“Collette will see you in the morning, I’m sure. For now, let me show you where you’ll be staying in the Hall of Attainment.”

I had a bed. My own, semi-private room, even! It was more than I’d been given at Jorrvaskr, and certainly more than the Thieves Guild had been able to offer—of course, I was never even a member of the Thieves Guild. But the College, they admitted me so easily, so quickly, and just like that, I had a home! I should have come here ages ago! Maybe it wouldn’t have been a great choice back when I was trying to find Brother, but for trying to stay away from him and Thalmor, it was positively perfect!

I was so excited, I could hardly sleep. The next day, college robes replaced Ama Nin’s grey and red outfit.

And every day for a week, that blouse and skirt went deeper and deeper beneath my bed. My alchemy tools found a home on my bedside table. I found the perfect spot in the courtyard to play Janan’s strange little kalimba, and none of the mages said anything about the sound being creepy or disconcerting. On the roof, I could practice spells late into the night without interruption. Days passed swiftly, lesson and lecture blending together in the Hall of Elements.

~

“What exactly is going on?” I asked. Snow crunched beneath our feet, Masser and Secunda gleaming above between thick bands of swirling auras. Being pulled from my bed at midnight to sneak onto the roof with two other apprentices surely meant that nothing good could come of whatever this was, and their secretiveness until now only reinforced my strong impression that something was about to go terribly wrong.

“Do not fret,” the Khajiit said. His fuzzy hand petted me on the head so that his claws just barely grazed my scalp; I shivered, and it wasn’t just from the cold. “J’zargo needs to practice some new spells. This one is very good at Restoration, no? Our dear Omnund here has agreed only to help me if you are here to—“

“Put me out when I’m inevitably set on fire,” the handsome Nord mage finished. “I don’t know why I keep helping you…”

“It can’t be so bad, can it?” I asked.

The two friends shared a look. “There’s a reason we’re doing this when all of the masters are asleep and no one sensible will put a stop to this.”

J’zargo made a tsk sound, or at least, something as similar as he could make with his cat-mouth. “You’re just jealous of J’zargo, and all of the progress my experiments have made!” The feline smile made his whiskered point upward. Since it wasn’t snowing, he kept his hood back to show off thick grey fur. I envied him—it would be much easier to live in a stone palace surrounded by ice if I were fluffy, too.

“Just get on with it, before I change my mind,” Onmund grumbled. As a Nord, he handled the chill at least as well as J’zargo, leaving me as the only student present bright red and shaking like the Red Mountain. With a short stretch to prepare, he stood back from us and readied a ward in front of him.

“If you know I’m good with Restoration,” I asked as J’zargo took up his place across the rooftop from the Nord, “why didn’t you ask me to hold up the ward?”

“Because Onmund owes J’zargo a favor,” J’zargo answered with a little wink of his slit-pupiled eye. “J’zargo gets him back his necklace, and now J’zargo tries out spell. You’ve done nothing to warrant J’zargo throwing fireballs at you. Yet.”

It took about an hour to put out all of the fires. I’d give it J’zargo, any spell that could turn snow itself to fire certainly could have its uses in a frozen wasteland like this. And, though Onmund was considerably less handsome with only one eyebrow, I could confidently assure him that it would grow back in no time. “I can fix you up a serum to rub into it,” I cooed, dabbing an ointment over his eye. “In a couple weeks, it’ll be like nothing ever happened.”

“In a couple weeks,” J’zargo added, “the spell will be perfected!”

“In a couple weeks, you can find someone else to test it on!” Onmund groaned.

The screech of the gates below silenced the three of us, and all at once, we turned to lean over the edge of the rooftop.

“Who’d they be opening the gate for this late?” Onmund wondered aloud.

“Was anyone out doing field research?” I asked.

From so high up, I thought at first my eyes were playing tricks on me. But no, there was no mistaking it. The man now entering the College wore black robes lined in gold that reflected the magical blue beacons ominously. He let his hood drop to his shoulders, and a mane of pale hair confirmed my fears.

“A Thalmor?”

“Ah, yes. This one heard something about that. A Thalmor agent, sent from the Dominion to be the Archmage’s advisor. It sounds… suspicious to J’zargo.”

“It certainly seems odd—Lenka?” Onmund asked, and I realized that he was shaking my shoulder. Somehow, I felt detached from my body.

“I feel ill,” I rasped.

“Oh. Here, I’ll help you to your room.”

There was just no winning. There was simply nowhere safe. I could change my name, but the Thalmor were smart, and eventually, someone would see through it. If I ever crossed the Scholar again (and who knew—maybe it was him walking in right then!), no false name would be enough to hide my identity.

I could run, but clearly, I couldn’t hide. A conversation from when I first came into the city rang in my ears. I couldn’t change my face—not with my current inexperience. But someone else could.

As soon as Onmund left me to sleep off my sudden nausea, I stuffed my possessions into my pack and satchel and pulled Ama Nin’s outfit out from under my bed.  
Just as soon as I’d started to make friends! When I found a place I felt welcome and accepted in! But when I came back, if I ever came back, I’d have more than just another new name: I’d have a new face to match.


	39. In Which the Thieves Learn More Than They Bargained For

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are a lot of folk in Dawnstar, from Thieves looking for answers, Assassins just going about their usual shady business, and a gfew others passing through on a greater mission. What do they all have in common?

Oh, sure, they all got hard at the mere mention of the Grey Fox, but not a damn thief had even heard of Gentleman Jim Stacey!

He lived and operated at the exact same time as the Grey Fox, but his legacy was her inspiration! The Redguard thief led the Vvardenfell syndicate to great wealth and strength. Under his leadership, the guild was able to operate in broad daylight! They didn’t hide in alleyways or sewers, no, they had their own cornerclubs in prime real estate, oftentimes right at the city gates, just staring the guard barracks directly and _daring_ them to take action!

But it was more than just his success as a leader and business man that made Kynvind adore him so. It was the Bal Molagmer. The “Stone Fire Men,” thieves who stole from the undeserving wealthy and gave to the worthy in need. They fought against corrupt politicians who would take advantage of the common folk, and robbed the miserly rich blind for the sakes of those who could put that coin to better use!

And unlike the common thugs and violent brutes of today’s Thieves Guild, Gentleman Jim Stacey was _truly_ a gentleman! He would not stand for a job that ended in bloodshed, or bullying the hardworking citizens! Extorting money was fine from a king who was taking food from his peoples’ mouths—not so much from a lowly stable boy who could barely afford to eat! Back then, the Thieves Guild operated on higher standards, higher morals!

Growing up in the frozen streets of Windhelm, it was _that_ Thieves Guild that Kynvind dreamt of. Dashing heroes in the dark, who could come along one day and hand her a purse overflowing with coin so that she would never need to go hungry again! As a little girl, when she heard the stories from the Dunmer, oh, how she dreamt that Gentleman Jim Stacey himself would come and save her from her poverty, her helplessness! As she got older, the fantasies shifted from being saved, to doing the saving. _She_ could be a Bal Molagmer! She could pick locks with whatever trash she found, she could break into cellars and houses and get food for her fellow vagabonds!

When the Thieves Guild started operating in Windhelm, Kyn was the first to intercept them and beg to join. Despite all the horrible stories she’d heard about the current guild—how they mistreated even the poorest of folk, how they spat on the legacies of the Grey Fox and Gentleman both, how they hoarded their booty and gave none to the people in need—Kynvind was determined that she would change all that!

For a while, though, she’d nearly lost hope. So many jobs were “muscle jobs,” which involved intimidation, bullying,and roughing people up just to assert dominance and power. Where was the Thieves Guild of old? Even the Grey Fox wouldn’t have approved of this!

Matters got better the more time Mercer spent away.

Kynvind assumed she would be alone in her idealistic fantasies and morals. If not even those with the same dark, impoverished pasts could see her point of view, who would? If their hearts didn’t sing for the tales of the Guild and what it used to mean, no one would!

Everything changed when a beautiful Dunmer cloaked in the Shadow of Nocturnal walked into the Flagon. Karliah knew the stories, too. She was a Dunmer, and had grown up to be a thief. All the old tales of Nightingales and Grey Foxes and Gentlemen, they weren’t just tales to her, but the foundation on which she built her very identity. They dreamt of a different Guild together, one that would not stand for a man like Mercer Frey to become Guildmaster. They shared the dream that had been lost many years ago, last dreamt by a genius of a thief in Vvardenfell…

And they got on. Ideologically, spiritually, emotionally—to say they were best friends didn’t begin to describe it.

If there was one thing they didn’t agree about, it was Thrynn. Oh, Thrynn. Kynvind couldn’t count how many times they’d called it quits only to rescind their decision days or even mere hours later. Sometimes they half-heartedly apologized halfway through their angry breakup sex, sometimes they were put on jobs together and their vows never to let it get intimate again simply fell by the wayside. And, while Kynvind always maintained that it worked out for them, Karliah could never be convinced.

“What are you going to do when we find Brina again?” Karliah asked impatiently. The Nightgate Inn remained cozy and warm despite the late hour this early-autumn night, and Karliah had replaced her Nightingale leathers for a more comfortable, less identifiable outfit of dark blue linen. In one slender hand, a glass of watered-down wine swirled absently.

“What do you mean, what will I do?” Kynvind asked incredulously. “After Thrynn dies of overexertion in the midst of the greatest threesome ever, I’m going to live happily-ever-after with Brina.”

“I’m not joking,” Karliah emphatically whispered.

Kynvind sniffed and turned herself around on the bench to face the hearth at the center of the longhouse. “I know. And it shouldn’t surprise me. I heard them joking about it all along, since I first joined, but I just thought they were teasing until Zeno said… everything. I guess I just thought Thrynn and I would go on hating and loving each other forever. It’s not that I’m losing him, it’s that… I never had him.” She took a long drink of her wine. “But getting Brina back in the guild is way more important than keeping Thrynn in my bed. We need more people like her. More people like _us_. A good person with a good heart who sympathizes with people. She was almost a priest of Mara! _That’s_ the kind of thief we need.”

“She _might_ even _tame_ Thrynn one day,” Karliah purred. “Make him into a kind, gentle—“

Her Nordic friend nearly spit out her wine. “You can’t joke like that when I’ve got my mouth full! Are you trying to kill me?!”

From the other side of the inn, paying no heed to the giggling, gossipy hens, Thrynn straddled a bench and stared into the fire, nursing a tankard of ale. The red on his cheeks bled down from a long day on the road, but he wouldn’t retire the warpaint no matter how impractical it was. Ritualistically reapplying those twin lines every time he woke served as an important reminder of who he was, the choices he’d made, and the mistakes he stood by. And, as life in the guild got more comfortable, that reminder proved all the more necessary. He wouldn’t let himself slip into contentedness, no, he would keep the blood he shed and the wounds he’d earned forever fresh in his memory. He would never let the recent success and influx of gold wash away what really mattered.

To Kyn, he was a bully; but to those who walked the paths he did, he was soft, merciful, and idealistic. To spare women and children, purely based on a sense of morality that otherwise didn’t apply to him? To send a foolish traveler away with a heel of bread instead of an arrow in her eye? Kyn could call him all the names she wanted; he could look at the pot of red ochre in his pack and know that the stain on his face was blood rightfully shed, a decision he would never go back on.

Thrynn was first to retire. For a while, he stayed awake, staring into the darkness overhead and wondering if Kynvind would slither into his bed again. But the hours passed in silence, and at last Thrynn was lulled to sleep by the whisper of wind through the wooden planks of the old building. Waking up alone was, for once, a profound relief—the sooner he and Kyn got used to not being an item, the better. 

His old band had crumbled some time ago, but he remembered the region well, and he knew where to keep an eye out for trouble, where highwaymen and marauders would wait on the sides of the road for passing travelers. With ease, he directed the ladies around any potential threats. Where there was no avoiding a dangerous expanse of road, he kept a hand on the hilt of his blade and studiously ignored incessant Kynvind’s braying about “not resorting to violence,” as if they’d have any damn choice if they got ambushed!

And then, he was home. His face remained flat and bored, eyes distant, but his mind raced with memories of a different life spend in the snowy city by the sea. A childhood spent doing a grown man’s work in the mines, and then a youth spent prowling outside the city and along the road. Some of the Windpeak women nodded and beckoned to him as he passed—of course they recognized him, considering how much ill-gotten coin he spent buying booze and nights between their legs. All the food he could eat, all the wine he could drink, all the women he could bed; he never expected to turn away from that life. In the best of times, who would ever want to leave? Who would ever imagine that life could possibly get better?

Sure, the Flagon served awful ale, and Thrynn wouldn’t mind if Vekel could stock a decent wine for once. And maybe his sexual exploits had devolved into an ongoing love-hate affair with just one harpy who he imagined “forgetting” in the woods on more than one occasion. And the Guild had their lean times, there was no denying it. But would he ever go back to being a highwayman?

Of course not. He tried reliving those glorious years with a new band to the south. Waste of time… No, his place was with the Guild, with those pig-headed idiots and sharp-tongued hags.

“Are you sure about this?” Thrynn growled as they walked along the icy shore to the edge of the city. “Barging into the Dark Brotherhood’s sanctuary and throwing accusations is an easy way to get killed.” His hand rested comfortably on his sword’s pommel. They wouldn’t be going down without a fight, at least.

“We’ve got a long-standing alliance with them. The least they can do is hear us out. Besides, our requests are hardly imprudent. We must protect our own. That much, even they can sympathize with, or at least understand.” Karliah led them around the bend in the rugged shoreline to a low cliff. The broken stone shrouded a slick black iron door in inky shadow. At the same time that she drew the mask of her Nightingale cowl over her face, Thrynn and Kyn pulled their cowls low. “Innocence,” she whispered to the door. “Leave the conversation to me.”

Neither of the junior members said a word of argument against that.

They knew their way around, no grand tour necessary. Not long ago, they’d been hired by the secretive assassin’s guild to help rebuild and renovate their underground base of operations. Thrynn himself had seen to much of the construction, since few could match his raw physical power in the guild that prized a silent stepper over a strong arm. They didn’t just know their way around—they knew all the secrets, all the weaknesses, all the disadvantages and hiding spots in the assassins’ own home.

So as not to cause too much panic when their presence was discovered, Karliah called ahead, “Hello?”

The cold stone foyer opened into a wider chamber. In the corner, a massive metal sarcophagus loomed over the interlopers. And, coming up a set of stairs the led down into the common room, a Redguard gave the group a single nod. “Welcome,” his voice rumbled. The greeting felt empty in light of his narrowed eyes and firmly crossed arms over his broad chest. “You’ve arrived sooner than your letter would have led us to believe. I hope you didn’t think you could catch us off guard.”

“If I wanted you off guard, you’d know it,” Karliah promised. “We didn’t come here to antagonize you. In fact, we only came to prevent any animosity that may arise—“

“Because you think you have some right to tell us what we can or cannot do,” the Redguard rumbled.

It was Karliah’s turn to cross her arms sternly over her chest. At her side, Thrynn stood a bit straighter, chest puffing forward. Opposite Thrynn, Kynvind took a step closer to the Nightingale, her blue eyes glowering at the impertinent murderer.

“Where is the Listener?” Karliah asked lowly.

“He’s not in.”

“Surely he received all the letters we’ve been sending?”

“Not one. He’s a busy man. Instead you have me.”

A small head poked out from round the corner, glassy black eyes blinking to the visitors curiously. “Ah! Nazir, why haven’t you shown our guests in! Come on in! Oh, it’s so exciting to have company!”

Nazir twitched painfully at the little girl’s interruption. “Thank you, Babette, but I don’t think our friends were going to be staying…”

“Nonsense!” the Breton child beckoned the thieves in to the common room, smiling sweetly all the while. “Take a seat! I, for one, will be happy to hear you out. The Thieves Guild, as it stands, are our only allies, and in our current state, we can’t very well turn on the only group who has our backs. The Brotherhood has suffered, and you’ve been the only ones who we’ve been able to go to for any measure of assistance. Now, if I’ve gathered this correctly, you’re here because you’re worried that some of our contracts may… _jeopardize_ our alliance?”

For a little girl, Babette held herself like a grown woman. Straight posture, deliberate gesticulations, tactful phrasing and careful expressions, every detail seemed to speak of a person unfit for the diminutive body the girl was confined to.

The thieves followed her in, staying in a tight pack all the way into the common room and sitting down shoulder-to-shoulder at the table in the center of the room. Though dark and drab, truly a dungeon in near every respect, the hearth burned comfortably warm and the homey scent of sweetmeats permeated the air with heady spices. Dark and drab, yes, but strangely cozy. It was almost enough to put the three thieves’ guards down—almost. 

“Yes. We’re concerned that you’ve got a contract on a member of the Thieves Guild. If our alliance doesn’t protect us even in the most fundamental, obvious capacity, then it’s a farce.”

An apologetic, fang-filled smile directed their way did very little to comfort the thieves. “I think there must be a misunderstanding, then. We didn’t know that we’d taken a contract on anyone in the guild. In fact, we haven’t had any contracts taking us down to Riften at all in some ti—“

“Your Listener has been ignoring our letters after sending his own demanding her whereabouts!” Kyn accused bitterly. Karliah silenced her with a hand on her dear friend’s arm and a stern stare of her lavender eyes.

Babette’s face fell at the claim. And, after drawing a slow breath through her nose, she looked up to where Nazir stood on the stairs. He, in return, shook his head slowly and set a hand over his brow.

“All this time, we thought that you calling him ‘Listener’ was just out of respect for his position… but you really don’t know, do you?” Nazir groaned.

“What do we not know?” Karliah said on a sigh of dread.

Babette sat herself opposite of the thieves, her mouth puckered in something that almost seemed… _annoyed_. “We can’t just tell you. The second tenet commands us to keep the secrets of the Brotherhood, and there are no exceptions to our allies. But… his interest in Brina… Let’s just say that his intentions aren’t violent, but he is obsessive. He thought asking as the Listener would prompt you to tell him where she is.”

“Obsessive?” Thrynn hissed. “What’s that supposed to mea—“

His sentence was cut short by a sharp inhale of breath from Kyn. “ _Noooo!_ ” she gasped, eyes widening in horror.

“Kyn?” he asked, practically pushing Karliah forward on her chair so that he could see whatever it was that Kyn was seeing.

“I’m glad she got it that quick,” Babette said with a satisfied smile. I wasn’t sure how many hints I could give without just outright spoiling it. And actually, I’m shocked you didn’t just _know._ He only barely keeps it secret.”

“What are you--? Kyn, what?!”

“ _Zeno!_ ” she nearly screeched. “Fucking—damn, _shit_ , how could no one have seen it— _Zeno_!”

“What? There’s no way! He’s…” Any arguments he might have had fell short. He was what? Skilled with a blade as any man? Easy to anger, happy to cause harm? Quiet as death on any job? “He’s a powerful sociopath who can kill people just by yelling at them… Shit.” Thrynn shook his head, growling under his breath. “I knew he was insane, but wasn’t it enough that he’s the Dragonborn? Does he _really_ have to be the deadliest killer in Tamriel, too?”

Kyn couldn’t even stay in her chair. As though covered in spider, she leapt from her seat and shook in something like rage. Karliah reached out to pull her back, but the thief was already crossing the room, spitting like an angry cat, “That bastard! He never told anyone! We thought there was a _contract_ on her, but _no_ , it’s just his creepy obsession with his sister again! And to think, he was a thief among us! A murderer, violating even our simplest rule! Brynjolf’s protégé, nothing more than a killer!”

“Why does he want to find her all of a sudden?” Karliah asked, pointedly keeping her voice down in response to Kyn’s higher volume.

“Ah… Because, while there is no contract, the Thalmor are after her,” answered Nazir as he took a short step to the edge of the stairs to make way for Kyn. “They’ve come to realize that Zeno cannot be contained, much less _dealt with_ , so they think they might control him with her. At least, such was our Listener’s theory.”

The junior-most burglar disappeared to the entrance of the Sanctuary, still seething. The sounds of her hisses disappeared with the scream and clang of the massive iron portal.

“I still wouldn’t trust her with him,” Thrynn growled to the Nightingale.

Nazir scoffed. “Fair of you to think so! He wants to bring her _here_! To keep her like some kind of pet, where the Thalmor won’t find her.” Arms crossing, he continued, “We can’t argue with him—besides that he’s the listener, there’s also his _temper_ to consider—but we’ve been dreading the day that he drags her here.”

“Then we’ll have to find her first,” Karliah said. “Before the Thalmor and before the Liste—Zeno.”

Nazir nodded, stroking his goatee before asking with a tilt of his head, “What do you even want with her? Cicero made her sound… clumsy. Surely she can’t be a thief worth all this trouble.”

“Nocturnal has spoken,” Karliah answered easily. “We want our guildmate back, and she wants the court of her kingdom in the shadows complete.”

Kynvind was still sitting out in the snow by the time Karliah and Thrynn emerged.

“Sorry. I needed some air,” the blonde confessed, sitting on her rump out directly in a patch of icy fluff. “I just… can’t believe it. Everyone knew he was dangerous, wicked. But he was let into the guild! That was the kind of guild leader Mercer was. He let those people in. He gave them the best jobs. He encouraged Brynjolf to take him in as some sort of star student! I don’t know if he genuinely felt a kinship with Zeno, or if it was part of his plot to undermine the guild… either way, it’s disgusting that someone like him—“

“Be at ease, Kynvind. For all that man’s faults, he saved my reputation, helped us to be rid of Mercer forever, and recovered Nocturnal’s Skeleton Key. While I will not deny that he is a villain, I will not deny him his merits.”

“That’s just because you slept with hi—“

“Kynvind! My point stands! And he’s not welcome in the Guild anymore, so there is no use in holding such bitterness. We’re going.”

“Do we know where?” Thrynn asked.

“If she’s avoiding Thalmor, she will keep to the east. Otherwise, the possibility are broad.” Karliah tapped a fingertip against her pursed lips. “We’ll stay a night at the inn, rest, see if anyone’s heard any news of her, and be off in the morning in whichever direction seems most promising.”

Ah, the Windpeak Inn. It had all the things one might expect in an inn. Ale, food, enough whores to satisfy the miners and sailors alike. And, as long as some still recognized him as a bandit with plenty of coin to go around, Thrynn had to practically bat them away to get any peace at all. While the girls cornered patrons to ask questions, all seeming to get nowhere, Thrynn finally sat himself down with some rough warrior-types. An aura about them kept the prostitutes away.

One glanced up, ready to tell him to back away, but the familiar gait of a fellow ruffian told the warriors that he was, at least to some extent, like them. Enough to share a bench with, at least. It was with a slight lift of his mug that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nord welcomed Thrynn to their little corner.

“Are you sailing out in the morning, too?” a black-haired, amiable bear of a man asked from down the bench.

Surprised to be addressed at all, Thrynn shook his head. “Not sailing. Going by foot.” A low breath barely escaped him, and for a moment, his brown eyes went to the bottom of his mug. “Looking for someone, actually. She’s in trouble, and she’s missing.”

The blond perked up. “We’re on an urgent mission right now, but when we’re back—won’t take more than a few days—we’d be happy to help. Rescue missions normally run anywhere from a hundred to three hundred Septims, but we’re up for negotiation. Most important thing is rescuing a damsel in distress, after all.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t need mercenaries to get my girl back.”

“Not mercenaries,” the friendly one corrected. “Companions! Rescuing maidens is as much part of the job as slaying monsters.”

“Though your resolve to do it on your own is commendable. Your woman has good taste. Not enough men willing to bear their own burdens these days!” another warrior sitting further down said.

Thrynn had to glance again to be sure he saw right—yes, he was indeed identical to the scruffy one sitting right beside him. That two brothers would be Companions together was a surprising sight. Thrynn wondered briefly what it would have been like if his own brother were in the Guild with him—or how quickly they would have killed each other running in Garthek’s band together.

“Not enough women, either,” the one at the very end complained. A woman with warm-colored hair and warpaint across her face. Beneath a thick layer of fur, Thrynn could see a battle garb that, if nothing else, spoke of her confidence of not getting hit in the first place. “Your woman may have good taste, but if she can’t get herself out of her own troubles, is she worth it?”

“You’ve been short with other women lately, is all,” the nearest twin said. “Still upset about our houseguest?”

She scoffed. “Upset? She was an exception! Milk-drinking weakling, sure, but she could keep up with warriors and showed no fear in battle! She was no damsel in distress!” She said something else, lost to the general rowdiness of the other Companions and the noise of the inn.

Maybe the Companions did work on the other side of the law than the Guild, but they loved drinking and brawling and a good fight as much as Thrynn did. Strange friends, certainly, but the hours passed and the booze flowed and stories of fights and broken bones filled the air between them. From across the inn, he could feel Kyn rolling her eyes at him when he and the Companion he’d been sitting beside cleared the table to make room for and arm wrestling match.

“Barbarian,” she sneered, just barely loud enough for him to hear. What did she want from him? It was civil competition, in good spirits, not a bar fight.

Hands clamped, elbows locked on the table, and smirks to match, the two pushed against each other with enough force to send lesser men tumbling like bags of grain to the floor.

“Farkas, your arm is shaking!” the woman teased. “Come on, fight through it!”

“No, lover-boy’s got it!” the blond leader insisted. “Think of your woman! Make her proud!”

“That’s not fair!” Farkas complained through a smile that’d only just begun to shake from exertion.

“We can’t very well tell _you_ to think of your woman! Can’t have you getting aroused in the middle of a match,” Aela shot back.

Farkas’s arm faltered as his whole body shook with a laugh. “It wasn’t _all_ sex—“

“You didn’t get a wink of sleep the whole time she was with us. We know, because neither could _we_.”

It was Thrynn’s turn to chuckle, but he kept his grip strong. “I can only hope for a reunion like that myself.”

Their free arms toasted to “women like ours,” their competition never once halting even as they tipped back their flagons and drained the contents.

“Strangest thing,” Kyn said, mystified, as she watched the Skyforge-steel-clad warriors joking and playing tough with one of the least affable members of their own order. “You’d think he had the heart of a Companion, if he could go a day without breaking the law.”

Setting her head gently on her Nord friend’s shoulder, Karliah smiled. “It’s a rare treat for him to enjoy the company of those who enjoy a good physical altercation as much as he. Think nothing of it; if he had to spend more than an evening with them, he’d grow just as sour and stoic as he is with any of us.”

Their conversation was cut short by the cheers eruption from across the inn. Whichever one had won, they could not tell, but the big one was laughing heartily and even Thrynn had a smirk. Companions patted both on the backs. Maybe they’d just called it a draw when they realized it could take hours for either to tire out or lose resolve. The blonde waved a hand to the innkeeper behind the bar, calling for another round.

As the Companions settled back down with their mugs of ale and mead, and Thrynn sipped on his own flagon of sweet wine, the bandit turned somber. “Have any in your order been in the Rift in the last few weeks?”

The Companions went still. Vilkas’s brows lowered just slightly, just enough for Thrynn to notice the tension building. “Companions are sent out on jobs all over Skyrim,” he answered carefully.

“The girl I’m looking for,” Thrynn continued, “ _my_ girl, lived near Ivarstead. She disappeared a while ago, and she has enemies out there. If you crossed her, or any of your order—I’ll pay for information. But we’re out of leads, and we think she’s in trouble.”

Aela looked hard at the blonde, but he was just digging into his pack, searching for something. Vilkas turned to stone right before Thrynn’s eyes, while Farkas’s brows knit as though he were looking at an unfamiliar puzzle.

Then the blonde pulled it from his bag—a battered, withered, stained, burned leather book, the prize that Thrynn had not found among the wreckage of her shack.

“I thought you looked familiar,” Arvid said. “But no, we’d never met before. I’d only read about you. Your war paint is just like she described.”

Like being kicked in the stomach. Like having his ribs smashed against a Dwemer steam pipe. Like watching her float in icy waters and hoping that he could reach her before he drowned or she sunk. Like choking on a shred of hope just too small to swallow down.

“Brina?” he croaked. “How do you have that?”

“She was headed north out of Whiterun a few days ago. I thought we’d see her on the road so I could return this, but we lost her, so she must have gone east. Whiterun or Winterhold is your best bet.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“She was staying with us in Jorrvaskr.”

“Arvid!” Aela scolded. She whispered something harshly about her whereabouts being secret.

But the near-Harbinger shook his head. “Brina doesn’t need to be a hermit. It wasn’t good for her. It was killing her. What she needs are friends who will protect her and keep her safe without caging her like we did. And if anyone knows how to hide a person in plain sight, and allow her the freedom she needs, it’s the Thieves Guild.”

“Thieves Guild?” Aela barked, her eyes turning accusing and angry on Thrynn.

Thrynn hardly cared whether or not he had the approval of some goody-two-shoes Companions, or what they thought of the Guild, or any of that. But the stories that had been told through the night clicked in his mind into one blood-boiling picture.

He knew where to start looking, and that was good enough for Thrynn. Good enough for him to throw away the friendships he’d made that night by punching Farkas in the face and breaking his nose? Good enough for him to get thrown out of the inn, bruised and bloody only minutes later?

Oh, certainly.


	40. In Which She Gets Mistaken for Someone Else

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brina finally gets to Riften, but the trip isn't one she'll remember fondly.

Life has a way of taking everything, just when you think you’ve caught a break. The ups and downs, the moments of hope and promise all got dashed away in turn, and by now I was beginning to believe that there would be no reprieve. Changing my face was, perhaps, the only option. The only way I could escape my fate was to escape my own identity; be someone else, leave Brina’s problems behind and get some new ones. Maybe just live a simple little life. Maybe just be a nameless, meaningless farm girl like I was always meant to be.

But every step was slow and pained. Convincing myself to go on between each mile slowed me to a crawl.

If I was giving up my identity, what would be left? My name, my face, my fate all changed, my past and my heart hidden away out of fear—at what point was this suicide? If I killed Brina to become someone new, would that make me a murderer, or a ghost?

Perhaps I was just being dramatic. But for every home that had been torn from me, for every friend I’d left behind, for every time I ever cursed my luck, maybe it was all just leading up to this. My heart broke to think so because giving up meant I’d never see those homes again. I’d never be reunited with those old friends. I’d be giving up what very little hope I had for the chance of some peace before Alduin’s ultimate act of destruction.

And all I wanted in the whole world was enough mead to drown myself in.

I didn’t have much, but I had a few trinkets I’d earned at the College to pawn. Though I had no clue how I’d possibly pay for the Face Sculptor to recreate my appearance. Supposedly, her price was hefty. Would I get a discount for becoming her apprentice? The more I thought on it, the more I realized she’d probably rather not have any competition. Why train someone to share your expertise if it’s also your livelihood?

So I needed a fortune. Not only that, but I needed to take that fortune directly into a literal den of thieves who couldn’t know I was there! The Face Sculptor was my best chance at having any sort of life, but getting to her and hiring her looked grim.

_Do I dare?_

By the time I limped into Kynesgrove, my mind had run the full gamut from despair to defiance a hundred times. I could have fought and argued with myself forever, but damn it, the thought of spending another hour feeling sick with fear and hopelessness made me want to scream. Enough was enough. I had to take my life back.

My fate was in my own hands. No Elder Scrolls would tell me what was expected of me or guide me. And it was time I take that to heart.

“Skyrim has a way of making Nords out of all of us,” Anoriath once said. Stout-hearted, determined, and strong: I hoped he was right, because I’d need every scrap of courage available to me just to walk back into Riften without money or a place to stay. This was a gamble, and I would be in constant danger of being found for however long it took to get the money I needed.

Kynesgrove looked just like I remembered, and a comforting whisper in the trees gave me the distinct impression that they remembered me, too. In the places where the forest had been cut down, the trees were just beginning to grow back from green saplings. Serene and comforting, filling me from the inside with a tranquility to quiet my burning nerves, the sacred ground beneath my aching feet carried me to the familiar inn door.

Warmth filled me the instant I walked through the door. The familiar hearth house a blazing fire, and the smell of mead struck me straight in the chest. It seemed that the inn was doing better than before, and part of me thought that the re-growing forest must be part of it. Kyne’s blessing had returned to the land, and every soul felt it.

I walked past the bench where Olev had sat the first day I met him, back when I despised him. I walked past where I’d sat with Ama Nin, and she told me to be a priest. What if I had taken either u on their offers? If I’d slept with Olev, not a friend but just some stupid girl he liked the look of? Would I have missed out on his friendship altogether? And what if I’d become a priest? Would I have been spared all this trouble, all of this pain? Could I have been protected by Mara after all, if I’d only swallowed my pride and given my soul to her?

But I left those benches behind and walked straight to the counter. The innkeeper, a Nord woman with dark hair and a face creased by years of hard work and worry, nodded to me in greeting. My look was not one to inspire hope in inn and shopkeepers; seeing a limping little wretch with wild hair and mage robes has a way of putting Nords on edge.

When I settled back down with a heel of bread and some water, a room waiting for me, I counted what Septims I had left on a table. How could I make money in Riften without being found? I knew enough of the thieving trade to make a profit, but I’d never done the actual stealing myself, and wasn’t sure if I had the guts or resolve to go through with it. Not only that, but stealing on Thieves Guild turf without their sanction was a dangerous practice, and could land me in hot water with Mercer. What else could I do? Begging for alms was a popular pastime in the floating city, but I doubted I could make enough to pay her fee. The temple felt like a gamble, and I dismissed that option fastest. Surely by now they all knew my current relationship with their goddess.

There had to be a way, and I was determined to find it. Would Ingun be willing to buy more incomplete potions off of me? Who was I kidding, I could purify my own potions! I just had to pray that Ingun had no reason to tell anyone I was there, or that the old alchemist and his wife didn’t remember me from all the hours I lurked around their store with his apprentice. Maybe that was too dangerous. Maybe I had to find a way to make money while remaining entirely anonymous.

I pondered my options until a slender man tightly wrapped in studded leather sat beside me. He nursed a mug of ale, eyes darting to me now and again. Self-consciously, I tugged the hood of my mage robes down a bit further.

“Do I know you?” he drawled. His accent had the melodic quality of Highrock, but his words fell slowly and deliberately in the colloquial speaking style of Riften.

“No…” I whispered into the crust of my bread. He didn’t, really—I’d never seen the man before. 

A catlike smile spread across his face, sending a shiver down my spine. “I think I do! More importantly, Sibbi Black-Briar knows you!”

That got me to look right at him, but my expression was surprised and confused. Sibbi Black-Briar? I’d never met him!

But he took my look as something else, and his menacing grin turned victorious. “That’s what I thought! He’s very interested in where you ran off to! His black-haired bride!”

I played it off, chuckled, and pretended not to notice as he leered at me the whole time I finished my meal. So there were some eccentrics in the world. Nothing to worry about. I often made friends with the strangest of the strange, after all.

No bards sang the hours away, and the sleepy travelers who’d shuffled in made no small talk, but I at least took comfort in not being alone. How had I lived for so long as a hermit? Well, I knew the answer—I hadn’t. I made a terrible hermit, and looked for any excuse to be around people I could. I never considered myself particularly social, but nothing makes you appreciate the company of others like being forbidden to do so.

No one wanted to talk to me, except for that odd Breton, but I didn’t much care; I made a point to sit and talk to as many folk as I could. I sat beside a pair of farmers heading west to greener pastures in Whiterun Hold and shared a few tips for useful remedies and potions from the local flora they would find there. The wife, in turn (her husband tried to ignore me altogether), told me a few folk remedies that I’d need to look into. I’d never heard of Nordic Barnacle being good for adapting lungs to breath underwater, but I’d need to try mixing it with histcarp to try it out. Would it be better than just using chicken eggs? The wife didn’t know, but I would be sure to conduct an experiment when I got the chance.

Then there was a pilgrim headed south for Riften, like me, but he would be taking a detour to a mill town somewhere here in Eastmarch to collect his bride. Their destination would be the Temple of Mara, for an old-fashioned wedding. Sure, it was hard to travel such a long way for a ceremony that any priest in any town could provide, but it meant the world to the little lady to get married before the goddess of family and marriage, and he was determined to prove himself a worthy husband from the start. I wished them both well, and though I wasn’t sure that Mara really cared what I had to say either way, I like to think my blessing meant something.

I spent the whole night smelling the tempting aroma of mead, but never once did I let myself order a flagon. Oh, I got close. I could imagine the sweetness on my tongue and the lightness in my head. But instead I wrapped myself in conversation and pestered my fellow patrons late into the night. Forced sobriety is a curse I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies. Nothing is harder than to ignore Sanguine’s promises in your ears. Forcing them out of mind is at least as exhausting as walking all the way from Winterhold to Kynesgrove!

By the time I retired to bed, I’d all but forgotten about the perplexing exchange with that Breton from earlier.

My bed was warm and welcoming, my room cozy. Oh, how I loved to sleep indoors! I was too exhausted to even get fully dressed, and flopped right into the fluffy furs to dream of my destination. Though no doubt it would be hard to be back in that city without even being able to see my old friends, I would at least have the satisfaction of wandering those familiar streets and alleys. Whiterun had been a home to me, certainly, but Riften I knew like the back of my hand, from the rooftops to the sewers. Running with the Thieves Guild made Riften seem more like a person, an accomplice, than just a location, and how I missed her!

Mercer may have forgiven me enough to allow a shadowmark of protection on my shack, but I could never tell them that I missed them all dearly. They’d never know the nightmares I had after I left, or how I mourned our parting.

So instead, I dreamt of one more night at the Flagon. On Thrynn’s lap, playing a nonsensical game of cards, drinking mead until dawn. It was a simple dream, but one of the sweetest I’d ever had. What I’d do to be there just one last time—

Jolted awake for just a heartbeat, only long enough to see a shadow move above me, I fell unconscious again an instant later under the force of a blunt object to my head.

I awoke to the worst pain I’d ever felt.

I couldn’t quite see. Everything was blurry and slightly red. And, for a moment, I thought I was dreaming, some sort of nightmare in which I could not move. But no, I was bound, wrapped tightly in rough rope. The world around me was moving—I was fastened to the back of a horse, draped unceremoniously over its rump. Pins and needles shot through my hands as I tried to summon magical energy through them; the bindings over my wrists cut deep and left my conduits of aetherial energy completely numb. One of my arms ached in a way I only imagined meant that my shoulder had been pulled from its socket. Even breathing hurt, and every breath smelled like metal. My nasal cavity must have been full of blood, and my nose no doubt had been broken. Judging by the dull, throbbing pain of the surrounding flesh, a cheekbone must have been broken, or at least clipped.

Wriggling got me absolutely nowhere. Trying to speak proved fruitless through the leather shoved in my mouth, secured by a shorter length of rope that rubbed the corners of my mouth raw.

The only people who wanted me were the Thalmor—so what in all Oblivion was _this?!_

There was no way to know, no way to ask. Facing the ground, I could not even see who rode the horse beside me. I only felt sharp edges of whatever he wore scratching into me where the rope did not come between us.

About all I really got a good chance to observe was the ground as it passed us. Either he made good time, or I’d been out for a long time. While my damaged eyes (probably a pair of hyphema—Gods, I probably looked like someone stuck Dunmer eyes into my head!) could not clearly see the texture of the dirt, I could identify the familiar shapes of birch trees and the mushrooms local to the eastern Rift. Luckily, my ears hadn’t suffered, so I could hear the song of pine thrushes, proving that he was indeed taking me to my destination.

Albeit in a far less pleasant way than I’d have chosen for myself. 

Maybe not all was well with the Guild after all. Maybe I’d misinterpreted the mark on my shack.

The hours wore away. Without use of my hands, even to cast a spell, I was left to hang over the horse uncomfortably. Rope dug through my skin, and as time dragged on, I gradually felt sticky blood bloom where the rubbing was worst. Everything hurt, and while we were headed in the direction where I _thought_ I had friends, the realization that this might not end well for me swelled in my chest.

It had been a long time since I felt this vulnerable.

I held my breath, and tried to look upward as best as I could, and counted the birch trees as we passed them. I would not cry, I promised myself.

We rode into the night, my captor determined to reach his destination without a minute’s rest. His poor horse seemed to be getting weary, but he never relented. I heard chomping over the clamor of hooves. At least my kidnapper had brought food for himself.

Bastard.

The horse clattered to a stop, lifting itself onto its back legs. A hard hand reached back and grabbed onto the ropes over my back, tugging to keep me from falling off. I was sure it was less as a courtesy to me, and more to avoid the possibility of me crawling away or twisting my hands into a position I could use.

“Get out of the road!” the kidnapper barked. A Breton accent with the drawl of Riften. That stranger from Kynesgrove?

“This here’s a toll road!” a voice answered. If his whisky-croak voice, sharp with a Ratway twang, sounded like anything, it was not a toll collector. I knew that line very well from the many times I’d been shaken down by highwaymen over the years.

I tried to wiggle, to get the bandit’s attention. Maybe he wouldn’t save me, but if I could make this inconvenient for my kidnapper, maybe I could find something to use to my advantage. Anything.

In the pitch-darkness, perhaps the thief couldn’t see me. Or maybe he wasn’t particularly concerned for the wellbeing of a mage roped down to the back of a horse.

“Get out of my way before I run you down,” the Breton spat. He prodded the horse a few paces forward.

I screamed into my gag, and this time the thief deemed to notice me.

“Looks like your lady friend would rather you pay my toll. Funny, I can’t recall any mages on the wanted posters.”

“I can’t recall how this is your business.”

The thief’s laugh cut through the air, and I felt the Breton go rigid beside me. “It’s not _my_ business, but you should know that the Guild has a few opinions on these matters being brought into the city. Ferrying unwilling passengers through their turf ain’t smart.”

“I’m doing work for the Black-Briars,” my captor said, his voice ringing with authority. “I’d like to see the Guild stop me!”

“They will,” the thief promised. “They don’t work for Maven no more. Tables have turned these days, the Guild runs Riften. Now, I’m not against a man making a living—I’m just saying, a toll would make me a lot less likely to tell the rogues in charge ‘bout this.”

His last sentence killed any hope that may have budded from his previous statements, but it did leave me to wonder what had happened since I left Riften, and if I might have hope if that’s indeed the direction we were headed.

“Not a chance. Now get out of my way.”

“If I get out of your way, it’ll be to warn the guards and myself a reward.”

“For fuck’s sake—fine! But if I see you again, you’re a dead man.” I heard a rustle, and something not at all like coin. “Here. Best you’ll get from me. Pawn it or keep it, but get out of my way.”

That was the last I heard of any exchange. The horse trotted forward, and I caught not a glimpse of anyone in the shadows. And my journey continued, whether I wanted it to or not.

I dosed off, maybe from exhaustion, or blood loss, or any other number of things. But when I again came to, it was with my whole body impacting the ground at once. Still bound and helpless, as unable to cast a single spell as I was to scream for help, I was in a thicket, wedged against the base of the city wall. The soot-covered stone still smelled like fire, even decades after the tragedy. Perhaps it wasn’t just the old char, but the event itself that stained the city ever after.

“Over here!”

A boot caught my shoulder and rolled me onto my back so that I could look up at the Breton and the guard behind him, wearing the tabard of Riften. “What is this?”

“It’s the girl! Sibbi’s fiancée! So take me down to the prison and—“

“Is this some kind of joke?! I agreed to cover this up because you said you knew what you were doing!”

“I do!”

The guard crossed his arms and groaned so that the sound echoed around his helmet. “What about this girl looks like a buxom Nord to you?”

“Huh? I didn’t know anything about a Nord! And I can’t say I know what buxom is—“

“For Talos’s sake!”

“I thought it was just a word for a woman!”

Slamming a gauntleted hand hard against the kidnapper, the guard barked, “Get rid of her! This isn’t the girl!”

“Get rid of her?! I came all the way from Kynesgrove with her! No, you get rid of her!”

“Why should I? I’m not the one who fucked up—“

“Because what am I supposed to do with her? You’re a guard, you can toss her somewhere and no one will ask questions! And if I don’t get some use out of you being a guard, why the fuck should I give you cuts of my jobs?”

“Maybe because if you want to keep working independently of the Guild, you’ll take what help you can get! Now… just walk away. Real casual. I’ll get rid of her.”

“We can’t just leave her here?”

“And let her be found? You know what would happen if the whole city thought some sick fuck was leaving women tied up around the city? Just let me put her somewhere.”

Nothing is as infuriating as being able to slay dragons, defeat vampires, and put down a coven of hags, only to be rendered completely helpless by a length of rope. I hoped he would untie me then, but the guard peered through the slit in his helmet and said, “You make a move, consider yourself dead.” He waited for me to nod, and then instead of freeing me, he pulled the thin cloak off his partner’s back.

“What are you doing? That’s mine!”

But I was already wrapped up tight, ropes concealed and still unable to run to run or use my hands. He pulled the cloak up high and my cowl low to hide the bruises on my face and the gag still around my mouth.

How I wished I could have set the bastard on fire! How I wished I knew their names!

As I was hoisted up, I could feel myself shaking with rage against the corrupt guard’s armor. Oh, if I could only see his face! If I only knew their names! I never considered myself the vindictive sort, but beating me and dragging me across the countryside, then just dropping me wherever looked fit, oh how I wanted to make them both pay for this!

He sauntered right past the other guards. “Found a drunkard out there. Just putting him in the Ratway where he belongs.”

The guards answered with a few murmurs of understanding and a, “Hurry up! My shift’s about over!”

Damn them all! Did they not smell the blood? Did they not see me trembling with fury?

He carried me all the way to Plankside, then down below to the canal. Just knowing where he was taking me brought me to a cold sweat. There it was, down a dark tunnel of slime-covered stone, the swollen and rusted door jammed tight into a broken frame.

The Ratway. He really meant it. At least he wasn’t dropping me into the canal, though he’d have been a fool to do so in broad daylight. But he didn’t plan on finding me a nice, safe little corner, either. In the very front of the tunnels, right in one of the first cubbies jutting out the side of the main tunnel, he dropped me unceremoniously into a puddle of muck. I cringed to imagine how much dirt and infection was getting into all of my cuts and scrapes!

And then I waited, with dignified patience, for him to untie me so that I could set him on fire. He would give me some little speech about what he’d do if I told anyone, and warn me that if he ever saw me again, I was dead…

Instead I was met with the echoes of his boots splashing throw sewage and canal water, getting further and further away.

He was leaving me here to die, however slowly, bound and silent and helpless!

Once again, my panic rose, and it was all I could do to writhe around and hope that someone could hear the rustling. 

Was I going to die here? Of all places, left to starve or be eaten or to be overcome by some infection? My whole body ached from the many wounds I’d taken all over some mistake—some fool who didn’t even know who he was hunting! My blood boiled, but I could do nothing but shake and whimper through the gag around my mouth.

“Hello?”

I held still as I could, catching my breath.

“Hello, is someone crying over here?” When I still didn’t answer, the distinctly feminine voice continued, “It’s alright! I want to help you!”

I don’t know why I believed her. Anyone should know better than to trust a stranger in the Ratway, especially when you’re already in a compromising position. Maybe I was just so desperate. Maybe I just knew that there was no other way to survive if I didn’t trust her. Maybe I knew I needn’t fear being recognized by anyone anyway, as long as my face was a swollen mess of black and blue. Now I shook and wiggled all I could, screaming through the leather in my mouth, begging this mysterious savior to find me and have as pure intentions as she claimed.

A silhouette unlike any Ratway resident I’d ever seen approached from the darkness of the tunnel. Curvy figure, clothed in an outfit of tight breeches and an unlaced blouse so suggestive I felt myself blush, her blond hair was bright enough to cast light into the shadows.

“Are you okay?”

I whimpered in reply.

Her hand pulled down the cloak from around my face. Blue eyes widened as she recoiled with a gasp.

“What in Oblivion happened to you, girl?” she demanded. “Who did this to you?”

One hand swept over my face, lighting fires through my nerves in its wake, but I could feel the irregular bumps, the swelling, and the cuts. My goal had been to be unrecognizable. And such was my result.

As soon as she pulled the leather gag from my mouth, I couldn’t help but scream.

“Hush, hush! I’ll get you to a healer! It’s going to be okay!”

“I won’t need a healer,” I croaked. “Just untie me, please.”

“No, I insist! I’m going to get you help! You look like you have more broken bones than whole ones!” She pulled the cloak from my body, and hissed at the ropes that held me, growing under her breath at every spot that had and dug trenches through my skin.

“I… I know. It’s alright, really.” Now I was unrecognizable. I would bet that Brother could walk right past me and not recognize me now! For all the pain, I could at least appreciate that I didn’t need to come up with money to pay the Face Sculptor. And now I was in Riften. Maybe I could just take up residence in the forest again, and go back to being the Spirit, this time without fear of being discovered, without aversion to going into the cities just for a little company. If I let my face heal on its own, my face would probably be scared and disfigured enough to never fear being recognized again.

But my savior would not yield. “Someone did this to you! Who? And why? Please, tell me and I’ll get you help. I’ll get you food, and a healer, and a place to stay—“

“Why?” I asked. She had the good grace not to flinch at the blood that came out as I spoke. “Since when do priests hang around in the Ratway?”

“I’m no priest. I’m a… philanthropist.”

“ _Philanthropist_?”

“Yes! I’m part of a… charitable organization. We help those without means to help themselves.”

“In the Ratway?”

She smiled proudly. “Wherever we’re needed. Just arrived home from Winterhold, in fact. We’re the Bal Molagmer, and we’ll help you get healing, and a place to rest, and we’ll find whoever wronged you.” She paused just before slicing the ropes with an ivory-hilted dagger. “You were _wronged_ , right? You don’t sound like the sort of person who has this kind of thing coming to them…”

“It was a mix up,” I whimpered. “They thought I was someone else. Dragged me like this all the way from Kynesgrove.”

Her dainty little nostrils flared, and she wasted no more time in cutting through the ropes.

Every inch of me burned in pain and anger. The sudden release had every joint in my body popping, and my hands and arms like alternating fire and ice and feeling once again returned to them after so long.

“Okay. So tell me who did it. We’ll make sure they don’t get away with it!”

“I can take care of them myself…”

“No, please. I insist. I’m not one for violence, but I think my associate would be _thrilled_ to have a talk with them. He fancies himself the chivalrous sort.”

I leaned back against the stone. “A Breton. But I think he left the city already to try and find the right girl again. He wore… studded armor. And rode a brown horse. Brown hair… And he was working with a guard, but I had no way to tell which.”

She nodded firmly. “Alright. We’ll set about finding them both and bringing them to justice. As for you, we have a mage close by who can help you. And as soon as you’re cleaned up, we’ll have a warm bed for you at the Bee and the Barb.”

I shook my head weakly, and felt my neck resist the movement. Every muscle had gone so tight after being bound in one place for so long! “I don’t get it. Why are you doing this for me?”

“You need help, and we’re in the business of helping. Besides… I can’t help but notice you’re wearing mage robes.”

I swallowed thickly, but it was mostly blood.

“We came from Winterhold on a lead. A girl, who happens to be an alchemist with a talent for Restoration, went missing the same night as a Thalmor agent came into town. She also happened to look just like a very good friend of some very good friends. An Altmer acquaintance of hers suggested that she might be heading to Riften to find the Face Sculptor. Would you happen to be Lenka? Or, rather, Brina Valus?”

I swallowed again. “I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about. My name is Arcadia.”

“Arcadia.” I didn’t like the smile on her face. Not one bit. “Alright, Arcadia, nice to meet you. Well, just because you’re not who I thought you are doesn’t mean I’m going to go back on my promises. Hold still, I’ll help you up—“

“Kyn!” How she’d arrived so silently, I’ll never know, but standing directly behind the blonde was the graceful form of a slender Dunmer. Lavender eyes pierced me from other my new friend’s shoulder. “We have a situation in the Flagon. Some wretch who haunts the northern road is trying to sell Brina’s bandolier to Tonilia. Matters are getting heated.” I knew that the newcomer had spotted me when I heard the sharp intake of breath on her silver lips.

“Karliah, this is my friend _Arcadia_ ,” Kyn introduced genially. “Would you take her to the Bee and the Barb and get her a room for the night? I promised to get her some healing, but we can wait until the air clears.”

They shared a look, a few nods, and some silent gestures that I did not care for. Then, with a strained smile and an extension of her hand, Karliah said, “Very well, _Arcadia_. Come with me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm about to hit 3k pageviews over at dA, and whoever catches my kiriban can give me a prompt, any prompt, and [I'll write it.](http://alice-in-black.deviantart.com/journal/Three-thousand-is-a-fun-number-to-say-KIRIBAN-474750757)


	41. In Which She Runs From Thieves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Guild wants Brina back, but she's putting up a (futile) fight!

Kynvind slipped into the underground corridors of the Ratway to see to this business of my bandolier being pawned, which just left me and this mysterious Dunmer who watched me with a leveled gaze and an expectant lift of her slender brow.

They were somehow related to the Guild, these so-called Bal Molagmer women, and apparently much more had changed since I left as well. The Black-Briars were no longer the focal point of power in the city, to the point where, from the sounds of it, the Guild called the shots over Maven. Between gaining new members and having some related party working among them, to expanding their power to encompass other cities, the squabbling rogues were now a force to be reckoned with.

Karliah unclipped the short cape from her boiled leather pauldrons and wrapped it around me to hide most of the wounds that covered my body and face. A shiver ran down my spine the moment it hit me—it was like being drenched in a cold shadow, like stepping out from a warm house and into a windy torrent at midnight. Though disconcerting, the coolness brought instant relief to the many cuts and scrapes and bruises that had been left from my kidnapping misadventure. Then, with a long and bony hand, she grasped my wrist and led me out of the sewers and into the canal.

Whether it was her chosen path, or simply a natural inclination, she led me only through the shadows and never once touched a single ray of light. We kept mostly to the canal and crossed to the north side of the city, perhaps to avoid the high concentration of guards in the market. From there, she slipped me into the Bee and the Barb and led me upstairs to wait in the relatively unpopulated silence while she arranged a room.

I kept my face turned and tried to remain as small as possible while Keerava opened a door for Karliah and went back downstairs without a word—whatever their arrangement had been, Keerava was making a point of being both discreet and prompt.

“So…” I croaked uncertainly.

“Just wait here until we get a few things straightened out. And then we’ll have you healed—“

“What? No, it’s alright, you don’t have to do any of this! I just needed untied!”

But Karliah shook her head, silver lips setting in a determined line. “Wait here.” This time, the command was exceptionally clear.

Wait for what? She wouldn’t say, but she shut the door behind me. I got the overwhelming impression that if I tried to run, I wouldn’t get far, so after shuffling my feet uncomfortably for a few minutes I finally accepted my fate and fell into the bed.

I thought I hurt too badly to possibly sleep. I was wrong. I was out before I even hit the furs, and all the aches and pains subsided.

If there was one thing I was sick of, it was these rude awakenings!

When Kyn promised to find the men responsible for my kidnapping and poor treatment, she’d certainly acted immediately. Unfortunately, word travels fast, and it wouldn’t take long to pinpoint the very few guards who were not in the Guild’s pocket.

I knew who my guest was the instant I woke up to the door bursting in an explosion of wood. A foot came through first, then as the door broke away completely, there stood the guard who left me to die in the Ratway below. For all Karliah’s subtlety, it probably would have been hard for anyone to miss a battered mage being led into the inn by a woman in midnight-black leathers, so it was no surprise how easily I’d been found.

Not a surprise, but certainly an annoyance.

If anything was going make my life harder, though, it was killing a guard. So I tempered my rage when I sent out the first bolt of lightning—call it a warning shot, just enough to rattle his bones and make the metal on his armor spark, but not nearly enough to kill.

He screamed, I screamed, and there was no longer any doubt that everyone in the inn knew something was going on.

Of course, he had a lot to lose, and I realized that. He’d been put in a very bad situation by an incompetent partner, and now he knew that the Guild wanted him. I couldn’t blame him for his desperation or ferocity. Nor would I let him get away with it.

He broke the rest of the way in and waded through the waves of electricity I sent his way. Smoke slithered from the joints of his armor, but he just kept coming until a heavy gauntlet smacked me across the face and sent me head-long into the bedframe. I felt the crack of wood against my skull, but I knew I couldn’t let up. I couldn’t risk setting the whole inn on fire, nor would I dare murder a city guard right in the inn, but my options were running thin. My almost-harmless sparks gave way to a more determined stream of lightning, and the sound of thunder clapped through the upper story of the inn.

A short sword flickered from his belt, and I barely got my ward up in time to stop the blade in its determined flight for my throat. I screamed again, and I could hear my own panic ringing in the sound.

Exhaustion, hunger, thirst, and overall pain can affect even the most steeled warriors—and a steeled warrior I certainly was not. Magicka drained from me like water leaking from a punctured skin, and for every strike of his sword against the translucent shield, my head grew lighter and lighter. With my satchel and bandolier gone, I had no potions to fall back on, either.

Could I make a run for it? How far could I get with a city guard calling for my capture? Could I even get past him to escape in the first place?

I didn’t want to die here, but with my health already compromised and my magicka running low, my options were few.

So I did what little I could: I held the shaking barrier up as long as I could, and I screamed.

Over my own shrieks, I heard Kynvind’s voice from outside the room. “Stop! Stop, don’t do it!” I thought the cries were directed at my assailant, until the feminine voice finished with, “Don’t kill him!!”

_Wait_ , I thought, _If she’s not talking to the guard--_

Before I could even fully question her wording, the answer was laid out plainly when the point of a moonstone sword blossomed from the guard’s chest.

“Damn it, Thrynn, you can’t go killing people! It’s as against the rules as it gets! And he was a guard, no less!”

“A corrupt guard,” my hero added.

“They’re _all_ corrupt! He just wasn’t working for _us_! For the love of—I hope you’re happy!”

“Very.”

The guard’s body fell to the side unceremoniously, still smoking from the lightning I’d sent through him, and now bleeding onto the wooden floor. With our views of each other no longer obstructed, I got a look at the man I’d been dreaming of and missing for months—

And he got a look at me, covered in blood, bruised and beaten, with a broken cheekbone and blotches of swelling. I had a hyphema in each eye, and enough black and blue spotting my skin to pass for a Dunmer.

Happy as I was to see my highwayman, he did not look the least bit pleased to see me. I swear I could hear the blood boiling in his veins like water in one of Arcadia’s copper kettles. And, as much as I’d hoped that my condition would make me unrecognizable to anyone hunting me, the light of familiarity shone in his eyes.

“Thrynn,” I tried to say, but the word was strangled in my throat. I began to sit up on the bed, to at least make myself presentable and not sprawled out so un-ladylike, yet before I could even get my bearings, he was turning away from me. My heart broke a little bit right then.

“A Breton in studded armor, with brown hair riding a brown horse,” he said slowly and carefully, like a mantra that he’d been repeating for hours. Maybe he had been.

“We don’t know how long ago he may have left the city, or if he stayed for a bit to rest and get supplies. He could be many hours out, at least,” Kynvind said. Every other word she was glancing at the body of the guard, and growing more anxious by the second.

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll find him before morning.” He wiped his blade clean and set it back in the sheath at his hip.

“Damn it!” The Bal Molagmer girl whined, “You can’t go and leave me with this mess! You killed a man, you bastard, and we don’t do that!”

Thrynn didn’t deign to answer. When Kynvind did not step out of his way when he approached the door, he reached out, grasped her by the shoulders and moved her himself.

“When you find him, don’t kill him!” she ordered.

“No promises.” There was enough acid in his voice to eat through stone.

Maybe he didn’t recognize me after all… or maybe he just hadn’t held on to that one night of passion like I had. Maybe those nights spent on his lap had faded into memory, and our time spent tentatively flirting had been nothing more to him than a pastime.

I scrambled to my feet and scurried after him, but even as I set a hand against the leather on his back, I had no idea what I would say. But if I didn’t know what had inspired that act of violence, chivalry or something personal, I would be obsessed until I saw him again. If I didn’t even know if he knew who I was anymore, I’d never be at peace.

Once again, my question was answered before I could properly think it.

He whipped around so quickly that I jumped. And before I embarrassed myself with a butchered squawk of a love declaration, he’d bent down and put both his hands against the sides of my broken face. It hurt terribly, his grip against the sensitive, torn flesh, the fingers that dug indiscriminately into the marred and mangled landscape of my face, but I wouldn’t tell him to let go for the world. And when his lips hit mine, hit the skin rubbed raw from the length of leather that had served as a gag, I felt myself swoon from more than just blood loss.

I didn’t care that this was the most painful kiss I could have ever dreamt up, and likewise, Thrynn didn’t care that my mouth tasted like blood, or that I had to put most of my weight on him just to stay on my feet. The rage behind the gesture heated me as though the fire in his lungs were being breathed into me. The hands that held my face against his, unrelenting and refusing to let me free, trembled in fury. The ministrations of his tongue were possessive rather than affectionate, commanding rather than pleading.

He only barely released me, just parting enough from my face to whisper into my open mouth, “I’ll be back soon, with his head on platter for you.”

I knew I’d spent too much time with Cicero and Olev and Companions when that violent promise made me weak in the knees instead of nervous like a normal person would have been. I became a puddle in his hands, but he afforded me only one more rough press of his mouth on mine before he let me go and turned away again, speeding off into the night to hunt down my kidnapper.

A gentle hand shook me from my trance. “We have to get out of here!” Kynvind was saying. She pulled me by the arm, past the Argonian proprietors who were on their way to investigate the screams. The whole ordeal had been very swift, I realized. The emotions ran so high that it felt like it might have been an hour.

They tried to stop us, to question us, but Kynvind was slippery enough to dodge their hands, and she tugged me right along in her wake, out the inn and into the darkness of Riften at dusk.

I was still blushing by the time she pulled me into an obliging alleyway.

“Were you hurt?” she asked.

“Just as hurt as I was before,” I answered. “Thrynn—“

“Shouldn’t have committed murder,” Kynvind hissed. The narrow nostrils on her cute little nose flared like a beast about to charge. “And while I don’t want him getting in trouble with the Guild, I just know Vex is going to give him a pass—she doesn’t think she plays favorites, but she does! Damn it, he’s supposed to be Bal Molagmer, and yet he’s the most violent member of the Guild as a whole!”

“Thrynn is part of the Bal Molagmer?” I choked.

She gave a stiff nod. “Supposedly. He’s not exactly generous by nature, but when he takes orders or jobs directly from Karliah, he can actually accomplish some good. When he doesn’t go murdering on the job, that is…! Bastard!”

“Wait, so how is this ‘charity’ connected to the Thieves Guild, exactly?”

Kynvind smiled a mischievous, toothy grin, her spirits instantly raised by my interest in her organization. Pride swelled in her ample chest as she told me, “We follow the footsteps of a former Guild Master, Gentleman Jim Stacy! We’re a sub-sect of the Guild, and we steal from the rich, powerful, and corrupt, and pass the bounties on to the lesser folk in need. We’re honorable thieves who seek to improve the world through our trade.”

Oh. It almost sounded rehearsed, like she’d been hoping that I would express curiosity.

I wondered, very briefly, who else had signed on for these other jobs, choosing to forgo their own pay, or take considerably less, for the good of someone else. Who else might be so inclined? Rune, perhaps? Or maybe even Brother?

My heart stopped in my chest.

_Brother!_

Damn, he was part of the Guild, and if he happened to be in Riften now, or with the Guild, he’d know I was here! If he found me, that spelled doom for all of Nirn!

I turned on my heel and ran. Rather, I tried to, but Kynvind was in front of me, holding me by my arms in a heartbeat.

“Where are you going?” she demanded.

“There’s been a huge misunderstanding! I—I’m not who you think I am! My name is Arcadia and I don’t have anything to do with any guild!”

“That’s why you knew about the Guild? Why you knew Thrynn and Thrynn knew you? It’s way too late to use that lie now, Brina, we all know exactly who you are!”

“Let go of me! I need to get out of here!” I didn’t want to hurt her, but I certainly would if I had to. A current of electricity zipped from my right hand to my left just to show how serious I was.

But her blue eyes were set with a determination that put a pit in my stomach. “I’m very much against kidnapping. _Please_ don’t make me do anything I’m going to feel bad about.”

“Why would you go that far? I thought you were trying to help me?”

“Because it’s not about you! It’s about the whole guild! It’s about the Bal Molagmer, and Nocturnal—“

“ _Excuse me?_ ”

The glow of a fire jarred us both. At the end of the alley, a guard stood silhouetted by the torchlight gleaming from his hand. “You two! In the name of the law—“

We didn’t wait to hear his command. Like a couple of frightened rabbits, we darted the other way, into the wilds of Riften. For a while, we stuck together, and I followed her to be sure I was taking the best path for throwing the authorities off our trail. But before long I felt my legs giving out and my chest burn, and I couldn’t stay with her if I tried. So I tripped down a different road, leaving her to keep going toward the mausoleum while I tried to find some other hiding spot. Somewhere that I could hide from both the guards and from the thieves.

If Riften has a lot of anything, it’s places to hide. Shadows were darker there, nooks and crannies deeper than you’d expect, and there was always someplace to disappear. Riften even has a particular spot especially for vagrants like myself; sure, I could have tried my luck finding a spot in the Ratway, but Beggar’s Row would just as well suit my needs, and put me out of the Guild’s direct line of sight.

It’s as glamorous a place as the name would indicate. I heard somewhere that it used to be part of the sewer that would have emptied into the canal, but the fire had caused some sort of cave-in to most of the connecting tunnels, leaving the main cavern isolated and useless. It now served as a home to the wretched and the poor, the infirm and the powerless. No one would ask who I was, and if I was lucky, no one would try to pull anything—it’s not as dangerous as the Ratway, but it was hardly a safe place for a lone woman to be leaving herself vulnerable in. And if there was anything I did not need more of, it was rude awakenings by men attacking me in one way or another. And I’m sure Thrynn would appreciate his hit-list not getting any longer.

Nearly pitch dark, it was amazing how loud the place was. Breaths from the dozens of Beggar’s Row denizens echoed off the stone in a chorus of sighs and wheezes, accompanied by the ever-present ringing of water dripping from somewhere. How anyone could stand that, let alone the smell or the hot, muggy quality of the air, was beyond me, but I didn’t have many options. And I was sorely getting sick of _not having options,_ as was so often the case as of late.

I took up a little spot on the floor where the stone was only somewhat damp. Despite the humidity and the many bodies all sharing close quarters, I shivered. Blood loss probably had a fair amount to do with that, I realized, but again, there wasn’t much I could do about it.

The time it took me to doze into a restless, nervous sleep was spent wondering where I would go next. Should I just go back to the wilderness outside of Ivarstead? Was my face not quite disfigured enough for me to be free of my identity? Should I still try to find a way to get my face rearranged by the Sculptor? Would I be better off just getting my face rearranged by some brute with a hammer?

You never sleep well when you know there’s someone actively looking for you.

My eyes must have popped wide open the instant they walked into Beggar’s Row, stooping into the low doorway, as if I could sense that my pursuers had located me.

“The way she talked about her,” a familiar drawl was saying, “you’d fink she wasn’ an alchemist or even a healuh, but a bloody _escape artist_.”

“Maybe she is,” another voice from my past answered. A Nord accent, only barely corrupted by the speech patterns of Lower Riften, said, “Maybe that’s how they always evade each other and anyone looking for them.”

Though it was dark as Quagmire in Beggar’s Row, rays of rising sun shone in from the old broken doorway. Why they waited this long to come looking for me was a curiosity; certainly it wouldn’t have taken this long to check Beggar’s Row if they’d started when Kyn would have first made it to the Cistern.

I curled up closer to the wall. They must not have actually expected me to be in here, because rather than split up and sweep, they just strolled lazily side-by side, starting on the wall opposite of me. Poor Vipir and Delvin would find nothing. Before they rounded the room and came upon my little cubby, I already slipped out of the cavern and into the early morning sun.

All the fishing boats were either out on the lake, or coming back in, and the crisp autumn air echoed with the hollers of dock workers. Now in broad daylight, I had to keep myself hidden while still being clad in my less-than-subtle, bloody and torn mage robes. Not drawing attention to myself would be a challenge.

As soon as I was out of Beggar’s Row, I was sticking to the walls, reaching into barrels in hopes of finding anything. Thrown in among some broken crates, I spotted a length of old burlap. Good enough! I wrapped it over me like a beggar and started up for the city gates.

I had nearly made it, too. Almost at the gates, almost to the guards who stood on either side of the door, I watched as they both took one look at me, then glanced behind me, and… turned around.

Guards literally turning a blind eye is never a good sign. My feet wanted to stop dead in their tracks, but I knew better than to let them, and I instead broke into a run, hoping to make a mad dash for the gates before whatever was behind me could catch up. Ah, that was just me being naïve again, thinking I could outrun a pursuer.

The hand that clamped down on my elbow wasn’t rough or violent, but firm, like a chastising father. When I was tugged away from the gates, I felt more like a runaway child than anything else. Pulled to the wall, just out of sight of the guards and shrouded in the long shadow of the eastern wall, I was pushed back against the stone and held securely by the shoulders. Looming above me, looking very much the disappointed parental figure, were the hazel eyes and red hair that had first pulled me into the Guild.

“Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you just because you covered yourself in trash, lass?”

I couldn’t think of an answer—I just stared wide-eyed at the man. If he wasn’t already rather intimidating, he’d become only more mysterious in his new ensemble of inky black leather. On closer inspection, it looked just like what Karliah had been wearing.

“Did you think the bruises on your face would hide the shuffle of your feet, or the uneven gait of your steps, or the curve of your back? Tell me, lass, did you really think I could be so easily fooled?”

Of course I didn’t. Brynjolf could tell a person apart by their shoelaces, and probably a dozen other things about them. But I had not expected him to be the one I needed to slip past. If I had expected him, I’d have been better off just setting the city on fire and escaping in the confusion!

“Sorry,” was all I managed to stutter out.

His eyes rolled slightly in a sort of, _What are we going to do with you?_ expression, and this time I wasn’t be allowed out of his sight as I was led south along the city wall to the graveyard. Waiting for us at the mausoleum, Kynvind was having a conversation with Vex, full of exasperated groans on both ends.

“He committed murder!”

“And I wouldn’t have it any other way. That wasn’t an unprovoked assassination on a job! That was him defending one of our own when her life was in danger!”

“But he’s always been violent, and making exceptions for him won’t help him! You need to at least chastise him!”

“Have Karliah talk to him, then. She’s the one in charge of your little goody-two-shoes troupe. But if it’s up to me, I say he deserves praise, and I might even direct him to have a little talk with the Black-Briar boy—“

“You’re supposed to be in charge!”

“Kyn! Settle down!” Brynjolf said. “When has Vex ever disapproved of Thrynn’s use of force? You know better than that. Now take our girl here and get her cleaned up.”

The Nord girl shifted uncomfortably. “What about—“

“Leave it to us and Karliah to decide what to do about the Black-Briars. Just get Brina to Galathil to have her face mended, and get her into her leathers,” Brynjolf said, passing me over to the blonde.

She frowned, but nodded and pulled me along behind her. “No running off this time! Everyone’s been worried about you!”

Down into the mausoleum, through the hidden tunnel beneath the sarcophagus, memories of a brighter time spent in the shadows came rushing back. How many times had I fled from disaster down here with laughter on my lips and victory in my cheers? Back when the guild was weak and unlucky, when every successful burglary felt like we’d taken on the whole world and won, oh, those were some of the best days of my life.

Nights spent casting spells to turn thieves into living expressions of darkness and stealth, days spent playing and getting drunk with the ruffians, how could I forget it? And how could I forget the last time I used this secret tunnel when I’d been ejected violently from the guild, when I’d crawled away from Mercer’s rage? The whole guild wanted me dead. They were convinced that I was a traitor.

And, though I sorely wanted to thank Mercer for letting me back in, for accepting me and forgiving me for whatever crimes I’d been wrongfully accused of, and while I yearned for that happy, simple life among the misfits and miscreants of the cistern, I also knew that my brother was among them. Kynvind’s earlier remarks about a Daedra didn’t sit well with me, either.

They were waiting at the bottom of the ladder, those who weren’t out finishing jobs from the night before or out looking for me. Rune had a great big smile, full of relief and gratefulness to see me in one piece. A few strangers I didn’t recognize milled around, looking me over curiously. They must have wanted to know what the big deal was—frankly, so did _I_! What was the big deal, just to get me back in the guild?

We’d nearly made it to the door to the Flagon when a new addition to the cistern stopped me dead as if I’d walked into a wall. “What is that?” I groaned. Anxiety rose in my chest. I knew what it was before she answered.

Kynvind glanced back to see why I’d stopped, then turned a loving eye up to the statue that looked over the hideout. “Our lady, Nocturnal.”

I didn’t make it nearly as far this time I tried to run. Almost as soon as I’d ripped my arm from Kyn’s grasp and turned around, I was tossed over Rune’s shoulder and carried the rest of the way into the Flagon, kicking and crying and begging to be allowed to leave.

“So much for not kidnapping her,” Kynvind whined, following along behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to the wonderful [DipFrick](http://archiveofourown.org/users/DipFrick) for beta-reading for me! Happy birthday!!


	42. In Which She Is Healed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been a long time since Brina has visited the eastern end of the Ratway. If the Thieves Guild can have their way, she won't be leaving.

No one can say I didn’t try. Sat down in front of Galathil the Face Sculptor, I tried my damnedest to ask her to change my face. “Green eyes!” I spat like a cat, shaking my head furiously to dislodge Kynvind’s hands. Rune was holding me against the creaking wooden floor, and I thrashed so furiously that even his strong grip could not hold me. More people tried to help, but too many hands only got in each other’s way. “Make my nose wider! Make my brows higher! Make my mouth smaller!”

“What in Oblivion is she trying to do?” Cynric growled.

“For fuck’s sake, just hold her legs!”

“Hold her legs? Easy for you to say; you’re not the one getting kicked!”

“Don’t let her pull anything!” Kynvind said to Galathil. “She wants to escape again. She’s been on the run a long time, and she doesn’t understand that she doesn’t need to hide anymore. Just clean her up, is all. No changes, please, just set her bones right and heal her.”

“No! No, no, no!” I tried to roll away, with little success, but the thieves did have to adjust their holds on me. Anything to at least make it more difficult on them. If they let my face heal on its own, it would probably be scarred and damaged enough to somewhat obscure my identity. If I could get her to mess up and ruin my face further, I might just be able to live out my life as someone else entirely, without fearing my brother or the Thalmor.

Such was not seeming to be the case. One by one, hands found good enough grips on my body to force me still. Kynvind held my face firmly and kept my hair back while poor Galathil, obviously uncomfortable with this whole ordeal, knelt beside me and sent rays of warm Aetherial energy through my flesh. I don’t know that any healer expects their patient to scream bloody murder at their wounds being mended. The cries of confusion and troubled murmurs grew louder until I finally gave up and sobbed the rest of the time it took for her to fix my face.

“What in all Oblivion has gotten into her?!” Ravyn spat. “Like the little fool doesn’t understand what healing is!”

Rune looked ill with concern, bless him. “She must have been through more than we thought. Something is very, very wrong with her…”

“Just leave her be,” Kynvind insisted. Now that I was no longer resisting, she stroked my hair back from my clammy face and ran her fingertips over my scalp. It was amazingly relaxing, really. She was good at that. Also, from this angle, her breasts dominated my vision, and I’d be lying if I said that her cleavage wasn’t oddly hypnotic. “Let Brynjolf talk to her. Interrogating the poor thing in this state won’t help a damn thing.”

A lithe, shadowy figure appeared from behind my little gathering on the floor, and in the dimness it took me a while to realize that it was Sapphire now scowling over us. “Thrynn just got back,” she said. “Should I have him…” Her eyes found me, still crying on the floor while the others exchanged frowns; Ravyn at my feet was still holding me tight in case I started kicking again. “You know what? I’m going to have him wait in the cistern for now.”

“Probably for the best,” Cynric agreed. “Is Brynjolf coming yet?”

“No, the Nightingales are arguing about something still. I’ll tell him to get his ass in here, though.”

Once my face was restored, Kynvind directed the unfortunate Bosmer healer to the worst of my other injuries, such as where the ropes had burned through my robes or my bruised ribs from the general manhandling I’d endured. All the while, the shapely blonde promised Galathil “compensation,” and implored her to remember her “deal” with the guild. Though Kyn certainly wasn’t the type to dole out threats, the message was clear that Galathil didn’t have a choice but to help, whether she was getting paid or not.

What had changed? Since when was the Guild powerful enough to boss around talented mages who traveled miles to live in their sewers? Since when did the guards all answer to them, and those who were not in their pockets were the ones considered “rogue”? What guild was this that they held power over the Black-Briars, or had an inner sect devoted to charity work? When I looked around, though, it just looked like the Flagon, as Ragged as always: tables and chairs rotting in the wetness, a fire in the hearth that was all smoke and no heat, and a small army’s worth rats that scurried fearlessly between feet. The only thing that looked different was that the perimeter of the cavern, all the cubbies that had once been empty space, now seemed occupied. But otherwise, this all appeared to be the same ragtag bunch of hooligans I remembered.

My sobbing had mostly come under control when I was at last pulled up from the floor to see Brynjolf himself looking down at me with a troubled frown set on his handsome face. “First you try to run from us, then you try to refuse healing, then you try to make her change your face? You’ve lost your damn mind, lass.”

“Tell Mercer I say thank you,” I said through my tear-stained choking. “Really. For the shadowmark, for letting me back in, for having me healed. I owe the whole guild, but I know how hard it must have been for Mercer to realize that he’d gotten me wrong. But you _need_ to let me go. I can’t be here!”

If everyone had been looking at me like something was wrong before, now they all stared with expressions various shades along the spectrum of confused and aghast.

“Mercer is dead, and you don’t owe him _anything_ , least of all _gratitude_ ,” Brynjolf corrected. He even seemed offended, an expression that looked unfamiliar and unsuited to his face. He waved it off with his hand. “But that’s all beside the point. You’re safe here. No need to run.”

“You don’t understand—“

“The Thalmor will not find you,” he promised.

I bit back the impulse to laugh. “It’s not just the Thalmor!”

“Your brother?” That stole the breath right out of me, but he did not relent: “The Dark Brotherhood? The Listener? The Vigilants of Stendarr?”

Alright, most of those were news to me. Somewhere between my panicked expression and the cold sweat blooming across my face, Brynjolf realized that not even I knew all the enemies I apparently had. He opened his mouth to reassure me, but I was already crying out, “The Listener?! _The Listener?!_ Of the Dark Brotherhood? What does he want with me?! I never did anything—nothing that he was supposed to know about! How do you know about that? Was it Cicero? Is he okay?!”

With just the slightest nod from Brynjolf, half a dozen thieves were swooping back in to hold me still. Not that I was going anywhere with Run and Ravyn still holding me tight.

“Calm down, lass! Everything is fine! You’re safe, and there’s no need to fear the Brotherhood. It was just a misunderstanding that we’ve already cleaned up.” Then, with a fatherly twinkle in his hazel eyes—how had he so perfected that expression, and why was it coming to his face with such ease?—he set a gentle hand on my shoulder. “You stay with us, and you’re safe.”

“And what about my brother? Did you say he was looking for me?” I dared to ask through my bile-filled throat.

Now his smile melted into a roguish expression I was more familiar with, complete with a mischievous smirk and sparkling eyes. “Oh, we’ve heard through the winds—“

“Don’t lead me around here, Brynjolf, this is serious!” I begged.

He relented, pulling a little bundle out from his belt. It was like looking at an old friend. Burned, stained, bent, and torn from various misadventures, my dear old journal sat in his hand like a treasure. “A few of your guildmates bumped into some Companions up in Dawnstar. They told us that you were trying to lie low, but that they were worried about you.”

So that was how he knew! My sigh of relief pulled every ounce of air from my lungs, making me slump down into a puddle of thankfulness at his feet. He didn’t know I was in Skyrim yet, I thought, silently rejoicing. The world remained safe—or, rather, somewhat less doomed. “He’s not coming for me?”

Brynjolf’s smile turned just a bit wider. His eyes crinkled a bit more than usual at their corners. His hand just barely held the journal a little tighter. If I were as he was at reading people, I might have made something of it all. “No, lass.”

“Thank the Divines!” I wheezed.

“Now that that’s settled, why don’t you get up? We’ve got a set of leathers ready for you, and we’ve reclaimed that bandolier of yours.”

But as half a dozen sets of hands all reached out at once to help lift me to my feet, I willed myself dead weight on the damp floor. “I… I appreciate this,” I said again. “But all that aside… I still have to go.”

Perturbed brows knit together once more on Brynjolf’s face. He opened his mouth to argue, but I cut in, “If you’ve looked in that journal, you know how well I get on with Daedra. And I don’t know when the Guild decided to turn into a cult, but I’m not about to give my soul away to an evil--!”

“Nocturnal is not evil!” gasped Kynvind beside me. “She protects us, and she’ll protect you, too!”

“Kyn is right. Nocturnal is different from Sanguine or Vaermina. She represents no sin or nightmare, but a primordial force. It is one thing to side with a creature that delights in the pain and downfall of mortals, but there is no shame in taking the side of a matriarch who supports everything we stood for to begin with,” Ravyn said. If anyone knew about Daedra worship, it would be a Dunmer from Morrowind, but I studiously ignored him.

“If I just have to keep on running away whenever you turn your backs, I will,” I growled, keeping my eyes level with Brynjolf. With the quiet respect the others showed him and the few cues I’d picked up along the way, it seemed that he must have taken over as Guildmaster. Never in a million years would I have shown this sort of defiance to Mercer, but here I was, ready to spit and fight against dear old Brynjolf like a sabrecat if I had to. “But I will not swear fealty to an Ur-Daedra.”

If he wasn’t already startled by my determination, he blinked at the phrase I used. “Ur--?”

“Sanguine told me. ‘There’s no contest over a soul when an Ur-Daedra’s involved,’ or something like that. I’ve got a hundred reasons not to stay, and right now, Nocturnal tops it.”

“And what about the reasons you have to come back?” a new voice asked. I trembled when I saw her, like a sliver of moonlight looking down on me with eyes that told me instantly that I wasn’t going to like what was coming. If anyone would be willing to play dirty and take the low road, it was Vex. “We read that journal of yours. This is your home, and you’ll never have another one like it. You have a man waiting for you, and…” She held up one hand, wrapped in a glove black as the void which held an innocent mug. I could smell the warm scent of ale as she lifted it toward me, though I did my best to keep my eyes right on hers. “I bet you could use a drink about now, couldn’t you? No contest for your soul means you never need to fear Sanguine claiming you. So what’ll it be? Living in the woods, alone and sober? Or will you quit wasting everyone’s time, have a fucking drink, and put on your damn leathers?”

 _Damn it!_ My throat clenched at the sight of my old friend and enemy, sloshing around invitingly so close to my lips. “Why are you doing this?”

Most of the thieves still milling about watched intently, and only a few seemed bothered by Vex’s unfair tactics; none, however, said a word. You don’t join the thieves guild to play by the rules, and you certainly don’t become second-in-command without being willing to come off as a villain now and then.

“Because it’s just one of the many benefits to staying here with us!’ Bryn answered for her. “And aren’t you sick of being alone? Living in the wilderness, or running from any home you make at the slightest threat of being discovered? Why not hide in Nocturnal’s shadow, where none will find you? You have a home here, and friends, and _freedom_. Let go of your pride, lass. You’re home.”

“Please just let me go,” I said. That ale looked wonderful. I’d do anything to drink it—as much as I’d do anything to leave this place and never come back.

“It’s not just about you,” Vex answered sharply. “We want you back, and we have for some time. But now, _Nocturnal_ has decided that she wants you back, too. And when Nocturnal makes a demand, it’s my job to answer. Pull yourself together and take the ale already!”

But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. My throat clenched and my eyes watered and I wondered how long I could bear to be alone again. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to change my face, to lose my identity, to call myself Arcadia or Lenka or anything else, or to live alone in an abandoned shack in the middle of the forest. I didn’t want to pine over a love that was lost to me, or count the days as I waited for the end of the world.

I didn’t want to drink myself to death, either, and I knew I probably would if given the chance. Also, I didn’t want to hand my soul over to anyone.

“This feels like at least a dozen steps backward,” I whispered hoarsely. But the rasp in my throat disappeared the instant cool ale slipped between my lips.

That was the beginning of a steep decline into a swirling maelstrom of energy and darkness and laughter and—it all faded into a single moment, a swirling memory of murky moments all jumbled into one.

It felt as though I’d been transported instantly. I couldn’t remember anything after that moment, but suddenly I was on my side, opening my eyes to the pound of blood in my head. My vision swam for several seconds as I oriented myself. Flickers of memories told a vague tale of laughter and relieved welcomes, old friends embracing me and promising to protect me. It all would have been very touching, cherished memories if I could only they were more substantial. I just barely recalled dancing with Vipir on a table and getting pulled down by two strong arms, and being held by them for many minutes thereafter.

A pressure on my lips, a hand on my hip, the sensations were burned into my memory even if the moment was lost to drunkenness.

Though I hated myself for giving in, I couldn’t deny the warmth in my chest that was from more than just a little leftover intoxication, but a feeling of companionship that I hadn’t felt so strongly since I’d been with Olev and Cicero a lifetime ago.

The first thing I noticed as my consciousness finally collected was the warmth against me, wrapping around me from behind. I was in a bed with someone. I gave a slight wiggle to assess my situation and found that I was at least clothed. Well, Drunk-Me, so far so good… I held my breath as I turned myself around to get a look at whoever was laying with me, steeling myself for the red and black visage of Sanguine to be leering back at me—

“Oh…!” I gasped.

He must have gotten as drunk as I did. His skin looked sallow and sickly, and the dark circles under his eyes promised a pounding headache when the last of the booze wore off. Red ochre smeared down his face in lines that appeared just as wide as my fingertips: a glance down to my hands and the red stains on my fingertips confirmed that I was indeed to blame for the mess across his face.

But there he was, breathing gently into my hair and holding me like we’d never been separated. Thrynn opened one eye, then closed it and smiled contentedly. “I didn’t think you’d be waking up for days.”

“This was a bad idea,” I whispered. “I can’t be getting drunk like that… and…”

“You’re home. Stop worrying over it and every other little thing. Yesterday was a celebration; you don’t have to drink dawn to midnight like that ever again if you don’t want to.”

“For the love of Mara, we partied from dawn until _midnight_?” I gasped. “And I managed to go that long, being drunk, without doing anything stupid?”

His smile widened tellingly.

“Oh, by the Divines— Did I embarrass myself?” I wiggled again. “I’m wearing clothes! So it can’t have been that bad.”

“Those are Sapphire’s leathers you’re wearing.”

I blushed. “Oh. Again? How does this keep happening?” I glanced down to the leather binding and frowned at the busted fastenings at the top. “I even ruined the buckles.”

“That part was my fault.” He didn’t sound the least bit ashamed. In fact, his smile turned a distinct shade of smug, and I felt my blush deepen. “Don’t worry, Tonilia can fix it. She might have yours repaired later today, too.”

“ _My_ leathers? I got those already? And they’re already damaged?”

“You don’t remember anything, huh?” There it was, that proud smile peeking through mead-colored whiskers. “I’m not apologizing.”

“For what, my memory loss, or whatever fate my poor leathers suffered?”

He chuckled a low, rumbling sound into my ear, which I suppose was my answer.

I glanced around our dark surroundings. The cistern was as gloomy and mysterious as I remembered, but now with that troubling statue looming over everything from the corner. I frowned, pressed myself closer to Thrynn, and whispered, “This was a mistake. I’m not cut out to be a thief, and I don’t want to worship a Daedra.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Thrynn answered into my ear. The sudden drop of his volume from intimate to secretive piqued my attention. “We just want you back. If you want to just sit and brew potions all day and act as the guild alchemist, everyone will still be thrilled. As for Nocturnal… you’ll be better off for her protection, but I think she just wants one of the Valus siblings for her own.”

“What do you mean?”

His broad shoulders shrugged against me. “Your brother basically told her what you told Sanguine. ‘Fuck this and fuck you and fuck the whole fucking guild,’ if I remember his exact words correctly. Eloquent as ever. He still hung around and did jobs for a bit, until he got himself kicked out for going on a rampage in the Flagon. We all got the impression that Nocturnal was sore that he wouldn’t become a Nightingale, and outright pissed that he all but threw himself from the guild. Soon after, she started demanding you back.”

So, Nocturnal wanted me because she couldn’t have my brother? For some reason, I was reminded of Cicero bemoaning the Listener, who was only chosen because I was not there when the Night Mother was ready to speak.

“I went months without getting drunk,” I complained.

“For fuck’s sake, Brina, you’re fine. No one is going to let you drink yourself to death, no one is going to let you get found by anyone chasing you, and no one is going to force you to do anything you don’t want. Whatever it takes to keep you in the guild and to keep Nocturnal happy.”

They’d all been assuring me of that when they dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the Flagon. But only when I heard it like that from Thrynn’s gravelly voice did it sink in. This is what I’d been wanting for so long. This was a second chance to have a home here. This was all of my hopes being realized. I thought back to living in the woods, and how the loneliness tore me apart. I knew I would have given anything to return to the guild and to Thrynn if I’d been given the chance; why was I being so stubborn now?

Because living in a tavern was bad news for an alcoholic? Because I didn’t want to belong to a Daedra? Both valid reasons to hesitate, but did I have any better plans for my soul? And why worry about the state of my liver when the world was going to end sooner rather than later anyway?

It was a horrible decision. But spending the rest of my life alone as a hermit was, too. As long as there was simply no winning, I may as well be happy, right?

I punctuated the thought by twisting around in Thrynn’s arms and craning my neck to plant a kiss against him. He tasted like cheap wine, and was just as intoxicating.

As far as I could tell, the cistern was empty. Everyone was probably out on jobs or in the Flagon, but it was a weak excuse for privacy. In light of that fact, I tried to keep our affections relatively chaste, though Thrynn growled in frustration as I eventually pulled away.

“I should find Brynjolf,” I told him, moving to my feet.

“You’re thinking of _Brynjolf_ right now?” he grumbled as he sat up. The blankets fell away from his torso to show off his exposed chest.

Agh, Nord men with their broadness and their muscles and furry pectorals…! I shook my head to try and free myself of the gravitational pull back to the bed they seemed to be inflicting on me. “Not anymore, I’m not. But, uhm, I was just thinking…” Damn, it was distracting! I cleared my throat and glanced away before his defined abdomen could hypnotize me further. “I should really figure out an arrangement with the Guildmaster, after I find something to keep my brains from coming out my ears. So he knows what I’m willing to do and what I won’t do… Where I plan to fit in, now that I’m… Well, now that I’m back.”

Even without looking at him, I could feel the satisfied smile creep across his face. “I waited a long time to hear that.”

“Yeah, well… I never would have left if I didn’t have to.” Since Thrynn’s bed was right beside the little alchemy table, I shuffled around supplies to find whatever hangover cures they had on hand. Thought it wouldn’t spare me completely from my poor decisions the day before, I fixed myself a cup with some chopped scaly pholiota at the bottom, floated a raw pine thrush egg on top, and sprinkled the crushed remains of a bee over it. This is the sort of potion that you want to drink all at once, and never when your hangover is already raging in full force. Believe me, it’d be impossible to take on a queasy stomach.

Those words killed his mirth instantly. “It never should have happened.”

I tipped the cup back and choked it down. I wheezed through the slimy coating it left in my mouth, “No one was going to take my side over Mercer’s; I know that, and I don’t have any hard feelings against anyone. In fact, I even forgave Mercer… mostly because I thought he was just mistaken and doing it for the guild’s sake, and I thought the shadowmark on my cottage was his way of apologizing, but the fact is, I let go of any anger I had a long time ago, regardless of what happened on his end. And it’s a good thing you weren’t there. It only could have been made worse. All things considered, it came out alright, didn’t it? And the guild is doing great now.”

“Hrmn.”

“Are you pouting?” I laughed.

“He’s been pouting for _months_ ,” a lilting voice informed me. Leaning against the doorway into the training room, Kynvind regarded us with a smirk. A cascade of golden hair tumbled alluringly over narrow shoulders and over her chest. While the front of Sapphire’s leathers I currently wore couldn’t close because the buckles had been broken, she kept the top of hers wide purely as a fashion choice, and it was little wonder why. Her cleavage could be the subject of paintings and songs. It might have had a city named after it. “For a while, I thought it was just what his face was shaped like.”

“Not now, Kyn,” Thrynn growled.

Kynvind kept her crystalline eyes trained on me as though Thrynn hadn’t said anything. “I’m sorry Vex used your weakness against you. She’s not the kindest among us. But everyone’s been happy to have you back, and I’m excited to finally get to know you. They’ve talked about you since I first joined, not long after you left.”

“I’m… flattered.” Maybe I didn’t remember my time with the guild so well. Being wanted back so desperately, being famous among the new members, it all seemed like maybe my short time among them was exaggerated. And suddenly being the center of attention was uncomfortable to say the least, especially if they were all just going to be disappointed later on.

“If you have any questions about the Bal Molagmer, you can ask me or Karliah. You’d be a great fit.”

Yes, that was an option. I could work with the guild and do something good at the same time. “I’ll talk to Brynjolf first and see if our leader has any particular plans for me. But… I like the sounds of it.”

I didn’t miss the smile that Kynvind shot at Thrynn, or the slight purse of his lips he gave in response.

Even the Flagon was mostly empty, but Brynjolf sat beside Delvin, talking business in low voices. No longer were discussions of money and jobs done with worried tones or frustrated huffs—finally the guild had enough gold to go around and an adept army of thieves ready for any challenge. They smiled as they talked, their eyes gleaming mischievously as they discussed who among their sizeable force would complete a job with the most spectacular victory. The confidence they shared warmed me from the inside when I compared it to the dismal state the guild had been when I first joined.

“Ah!” Brynjolf exclaimed when he finally noticed me emerge from the cistern. “There you are, lass! Have a seat.”

They told me briefly about what had happened while I was away. Mercer and Nocturnal and the Nightingales and my brother, though they said very little when it came to the latter. I’d missed a lot. In fact, I’d missed a complete rebirth of the guild, and the start of a new golden age among the thieves. They thrived, with footholds and jobs and fences in every corner of Skyrim! It was an opportune time for me to return, Bryn said.

“As for you, we could use an alchemist here. We hired one, but he didn’t last. Kept trying to sell moonsugar to the new recruits, and not for use in potions. But any help you can offer in jobs would be appreciated. Your skills with magic were always useful, and I know Karliah has been anxious to count you among the Bal Molagmer.”

It all sounded so natural. So easy, like my life was just falling right back into where it would have been if I’d never been forced out.

Tonilia had my leathers ready for me. I could scarcely recognize myself in the reservoir’s reflection. My scrawny frame had never been so exposed as it now was in the snug-fitting armor, and it would take getting used to the thick, heavy material. My unruly hair barely fit beneath the hood, but once I hid away the curls, my reflection became a different person entirely. The little raggedy girl was replaced by a shadow, ominous and powerful and mysterious.

I finally felt like the Spirit of the Rift.


	43. In Which She Is Bal Molagmer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reunited with the guild, Brina is slowly making herself at home again between acting as the guild alchemist, going on Bal Molagmer jobs, and trying to figure out just where she stands with Thrynn these days. Her understanding of relationships may be a bit stunted.

In the Ratway, where the booze is safer to drink than the water and drunkenness wasn’t a state of being but a time of day, the concept of alcoholism being something that needs to be cured was a bit foreign. To be sure, they all knew there were times to clean up and clear their heads, for a job or what have you, but for me to sit down in the Flagon with a mug of milk for the third day in a row… Well, I think they were more concerned by this than any amount of mead I may have tried to consume.

And bless them, they didn’t want to harm me, but most of the rogues and cutpurses simply didn’t understand.

“Sanguine can’t get you here,” Rune offered helpfully. “You know it’s safe!”

“It’s not just about Sanguine, it’s about _me_ ,” I explained for the hundredth time.

“I think you’re not giving yourself enough credit.”

“You’re _hilarious_ when you’re drunk!” Vipir added.

I shook my head again and tried to ignore Thrynn’s tin cup of cheap wine set beside my milk. My place on his lap was ready for my return. Upon receiving my journal, I realized that the battered old thing earned itself new folds to the pages and creases in the binding. How many people had read it by now? Arvid, all of the Nightingales and Delvin, Thrynn, and maybe others. Though I ought to have felt as though my privacy was invaded, and I did blush to imagine all the details I might never have told any of those people face to face, I was also profoundly struck just envisioning them pouring over my trite, petty little laments like a treasure map, using it to find me because they believed in me, because they loved me. To them, my stupid ramblings were sacred. It told them all the things I might never have told them—how I loved them and missed them, how I admired them and longed to be reunited as much as they did. I fought them when they initially found me, yes, but they knew better. Their insistence to see me back in the fold was just echoes from my own hand, pages upon pages about what they meant to me and how I mourned our separation and how at home I felt in this sewer. They saw through my stubbornness because I told them the truth in no uncertain terms in this old leather diary. I had wondered if any of them even really cared that I was gone. The new bends in the binding were proof that they did, more than I ever thought.

Every now and then, Thrynn’s touches felt stiff. It must be hard, I thought, being separated so early into a new relationship and then just picking it back up, and trying to pretend that the months apart hadn’t happened. The benefit of the doubt was very easy to give, especially considering that our relationship had been a rather simple thing. Mostly a friendship, with a few brief expressions of what might have been romance—but was probably something far more casual than that. That’s just how it was with Nords, I thought.

After all, all I had to do was dance with Arvid for him to decide we should get married. That’s just how Nords are when it comes to love.

Kynvind sat herself down beside me and waved off the men’s badgering with an impatient hand. “Oh, leave her alone! The last thing you want is the alchemist brewing your potions and mixing your oils drunk off her ass when she makes them. How’ll you feel when you take a potion for your warts and your hair all falls out, hm?”

Beneath me, Thrynn went a bit rigid, and his arms across my front tightened.

I said, “Thank you, Kyn.” For at least the fifth time today, she swooped in to my defense.

She flashed me a smile, and when Thrynn turned his face away, her nose crinkled in delight. “Ah, but I’m not just here to chat. Sweet Brina, how would you like to accompany Karliah and I on a Bal Molagmer mission?”

“What mission?” Thrynn asked.

“Just a burglary job, no need to get offended that you weren’t invited,” Kynvind said offhandedly. “Our fence in Windhelm got someone looking to buy a certain locket belonging to one of the more affluent citizens of the city. In exchange, the price of the locket and the fee for services rendered will go to the Gray Quarter. We won’t see a single coin, but it’s as straightforward and pure as a Bal Molagmer job gets.” Her smile widened. “We’re heading out tomorrow morning. Do you want in, Miss Stone-Cat?”

I wasn’t doing normal jobs these days, and I didn’t miss them. But for Bal Molagmer, to do jobs that made me feel justified and like I was doing real good, I was more than willing to venture out of the cistern and away from my alchemy table. Putting on the guild leathers felt like a complete transformation. Our uniform was almost exactly the same as the rest of the guild, except that our gloves were snug, very soft black leather, a symbol from the past that the founding members insisted on holding on to. Thrynn retired to bed while I packed, but not before volunteering to help me into the outfit.

“Hold still,” he said, batting my hands away from the many clips and fastenings. “You’re going to tie yourself into a knot. This strap need to go underneath…” His hands could work the guild armor into place as easily and quickly as I could chop white caps. Which is damn fast and easy. He wasn’t shy to see me in a state of slight undress, but his prowess with buckles had not been used to take my clothes off since I’d come back. As if there were some invisible wall that allowed certain demonstrations of affection and not others, I couldn’t quite tell what was preventing either of us from going back to where we’d left off.

None the less, wandering eyes told me that it wasn’t purely an act of charity on his part that he helped me dress. And he didn’t stop looking over me until I finally pecked him gently on the lips and he fell backward into his bed.

Hours before dawn, I already had my pack ready and my bandolier stocked with all the potions I could imagine being even the least bit useful to us. My satchel, recovered from a certain Breton kidnapper who, from what I gathered, had a new residence at the bottom of Lake Honrich courtesy of a livid Thrynn, only accompanied me when I wore my street clothes. When I dressed for a job, it only got in the way. I made sure to sift through the bloodstained leather bag for ingredients and other bits to fill my pockets—I would kick myself later if I left useful reagents that I might need later. We wouldn’t set out for a while yet, but I sat in the Flagon, dressed, packed, ready and eager, heart already pumping for an adventure that was many days to come. I sat with Delvin and Brynjolf as they gave me hints and advice to keep myself out of sight and out of the grasp of the watch, and I soaked in their words of wisdom like a lecture in the Hall of Elements back in the College.

“You know,” Brynjolf said offhandedly, “you look like a completely different person in the leathers. You hold yourself differently, you move differently, and except for your build, I might not even recognize you.”

“Thank you.” I’m not sure if it was a compliment or not, but the idea that I could ever fool Brynjolf, even just barely, was astounding.

“Have you been feeling at home here?” he asked. There it was again, that expression I’d caught a glimmer of when I was dragged in here kicking and screaming. A paternal concern filled his eyes, and right in front of me the dashing Brynjolf turned into the Guild Master. Somehow, the fatherly tone his voice took made me feel uneasy, like how I’d probably feel if someone I respected and looked up to suddenly asked me to call him ‘daddy.’ “You’ve been getting along with... everyone, right?”

Should I not have been? I nodded. “Yes. It’s like I was never gone.”

“Glad to hear it. You and Kynvind are getting on well… Have you two talked much?” I could tell he was getting at something else, the way his eyes twinkled with something unsaid.

“No.” My fingers tapped each other anxiously under his gaze. He was picking me apart, detail by detail, reading me like the open book I was, and I could feel it.

Whatever he found, it didn’t show on his face. “I see… What about you and Thrynn?”

Despite myself, despite knowing that I was giving him more information than I really needed to, my lips spread and my face heated up with a blush across my cheeks. “We… haven’t really talked, either. But—“

“It’s been implied,” Brynjolf finished for me. “The lad never wanted to believe that you betrayed us. It hurt us all to think you played us, but him most of all.”

“He’s my best friend here,” I said.

“And more…?”

“It’s been implied.” I knew why he was so interested, and it’s not because he cared who was sleeping with who. He worried that I would try to run away again at the first reason to present itself, and he needed to keep tabs on me to be sure I had more reason to stay than sneak off.

“The matter with Farkas upset him.”

I blinked. “Farkas?”

“When the Bal Molagmer bumped into the Companions in Dawntsar, Farkas was with them. When Farkas and Thrynn realized their women were, in fact, _woman_ , they didn’t exactly laugh it off.”

“I didn’t think I’d ever see Thrynn again. Besides, I’m no one’s woman. Marriage never came up.” I shrugged. “With either of them. I thought that was how Nords in Skyrim did things.”

Now it was Bryn’s turn to look lost, and even Delvin leaned forward with a perplexed crease between his brows. “What’s that supposed to mean?” the old Breton asked.

How to put this? “I spent enough time in the temple of Mara to know how marriage works here in Skyrim. People marry for the simplest reasons, barely knowing each other. If you’re even the slightest bit interested, you don’t dawdle, there’s virtually no courtship for most people at all. So I figured, if marriage doesn’t come up, it’s just…” I shrugged, not sure how to finish my own sentence. Surely I felt like the bond between Thrynn and I was, well, _there_. I cared for him deeply. But if marriage was such a snap decision in these parts, wouldn’t he have made it by now?

“You’re telling me,” Delvin said, stupefied, “you think, if you ain’t married, you ain’t _nothin’_?”

“Isn’t—isn’t that just how it works here?”

The two guild leaders shared a look, part amusement and part amazement. “You said you and Thrynn haven’t talked much?” Brynjolf asked. When I nodded uncertainly, he said, “You really should, lass. You should probably talk to Kyn, too.”

Talking to Thrynn would have to wait, since I’d be off to Windhelm at sunup, but it was going to be just me, Kyn, and Karliah on the job, so I’d have ample opportunity to talk to her at least. Before we left through the cistern and out the graveyard, I tiptoed to Thrynn’s bed and shook him by the shoulders.

First one eye opened on me, then the other, then they both closed contentedly. “Leaving?” he said, his gravelly voice especially thick with sleep.

“I’ll be back in a week,” I whispered.

One calloused hand caught me by the nape of my neck and pulled me in for a parting kiss. Longer and deeper than we’d shared since I first returned and woke up, clothed, in his bed that first morning. I thought about pulling away, and as if he could hear my thoughts, he pulled me closer with his other hand and held me stubbornly.

A hand on my back startled me out of my skin before I’d fully melted onto the bed.

“Our carriage is ready,” Karliah said. Everything that came out of her mouth sounded silken and melodic, yet she still managed to be overwhelmingly intimidating. Like her close friend Kynvind, she boasted a sort of beauty that made me incredibly aware of my every flaw. Combined with her power, pedigree, and status, she might as well have been Thieves Guild royalty.

Excited as I was to do this job, leaving Thrynn again proved surprisingly difficult. This wasn’t like last time we’d parted ways, when I thought it was for good. It’d only be a week! But I surprised myself with how much I’d gotten used to the idea of just… staying with him.

He glared daggers into the back of Karliah’s head when she walked away, but bid me a heartfelt, unintelligible grumble of what I assumed was a farewell.

Karliah led me out of the cistern and through the mausoleum. In the graveyard, Kynvind waited for us on an obliging tombstone, glowing in the first rays of sunlight that stained the crisp air the softest shade of pink.

Her toes barely kicked the grass below her, and an excited smile played across her lips. Once she saw us, she hopped down and bounced, the essence of childlike eagerness. The whole way through the city, she practically skipped and held my hand like childhood friends.

Our carriage was paid for in debts to the guild rather than gold. The driver, a middle-aged Nord, sipped something a fair bit stronger than ale all morning, and left the three ladies he escorted completely alone. Since he was apparently enough in the guild’s pocket not to be a threat, Karliah started talking us through the plan without fear that he would overhear.

Naturally we’d be striking one of those huge mansions on the western side of the city. Some elf-hating, xenophobic Stormcloak family, so it felt particularly vindicating that our profit was going to the Gray Quarter and that the person who’d be taking the target was Karliah herself. We delighted in the irony together for hours.

“It will be quick,” she promised us. “We shall complete the job the night of our arrival, deliver the locket, and be back in this very cart before dawn.”

I barely knew these women, but there was plenty of time to chat over the three days that we sat in the cart. Before we even got to Windhelm, I knew their life stories. Poor Karliah had been through more than I could fathom, but remained steadfastly devoted to the guild no matter what they’d put her through. What Mercer did to me paled in comparison to the atrocities committed against her, and though she would have been completely justified in turning her back on them forever, she instead committed herself to reclaiming the guild from Mercer’s unworthy hands.

Guild royalty.

Nothing tells you you’re close to Windhelm like the sudden drop in temperature and the constant fall of snow. Kynvind’s eyes lit up to see the dark mass of stone on the horizon as we approached the city.

“You’re from Windhelm, right?” I asked.

Her eyes were far away, looking at some distant memory. “I lived in the Gray Quarter. Just another orphaned wretch in the filth. My life got drastically better when I realized how much food was in other peoples’ houses and learned how to get in them.” Thievery was a lifestyle that Karliah was born into; it was a matter of survival for the Nord, a skill that she crafted by trial and error rather than under the tutelage of lifelong experts. She could pick a lock as well with a belt buckle as she could with a proper pick, the result of learning the trade with whatever she had on hand. As we rolled up to the bridge to the city, Kynvind was the first to jump out into the inviting blanket of snow.

There’s a sort of look that comes over people when they’re home. My heart sputtered to see how positively radiant she was, just looking over the city.

“This is what I’ve always dreamt of,” she whispered into the icy air. “I always stole for the other urchins, but to be here as Bal Molagmer, like Gentleman Jim Stacey, stealing from the rich to give to the poor…” I couldn’t tell in the dim dusk, but I thought her eyes might have been watering. “This is a dream come true.”

We stuck to the plan. No delay, we went straight through the city to the Stone Quarter and located our target. All the old mansions looked about the same to me, but Kynvind insisted that the facade on this one was different. The ancient building had been restored and improved very recently. I thought it just looked gray and cold like everything else in this stupid city, but I took her word for it. Obviously they were wealthy enough not to miss one silly locket.

I clumsily clamored up to the rooftop of the next nearest manor. Amazingly, none of the guards milling about saw or paid any heed to me thanks to my new set of dark and enchanted garb. Only when I got to the top did I feel safe from the watch. Against the dark sky, obscured by falling snow, I felt truly invisible. From here, I could cast my spells and cause distractions to keep the guard occupied. Kyn and Karliah sat beside me on the topmost ridge of the roof while I casted my first spells.

A line of blue drew itself across my vision like a thin blue hair caught in my eye. It sat atop my vision, like a line of ink drawn on a map, so I had to make a few assumptions regarding depth, but the basic path was clear enough. “Your best entrance will be the back door. Stick to the back of the house and you’ll see the stairs up. Three stories. Target’s at the top, in a room on the…” I leaned to the side to observe the blue squiggle from another angle. “Southern side of the house.”

“So we should go back to the ground floor and go all the way up?” Kynvind asked.

“Yeah… You could try a window higher up, but I’m thinking that sending a line across the rooftops and hoping that you can open those frozen latches while dangling pretty far from the edge…” I let her imagine the many challenges that plan posed. “Take the back door. It’ll actually put you very close to the stairs. Just stick to the east side of the house until you get to the top, then keep going forward to the southern side of the house.”

My clairvoyance spell was my biggest contribution, since it would save them potentially a lot of time. But I didn’t stop there. I passed them two potions each for their own consumption, and cast a simple muffling spell on them while they drank them down.

“Ugh. That is the most wretched thing I’ve ever drank,” Kyn gagged.

“You get used to it.” My own sense of taste had suffered at the hands of my trade. A small price to pay, I thought. One more spell lit Aetherial sparks behind my eyes as I cast a life detection spell, and it was with a frown that I said, “There are two people sleeping in the room the target’s in. They’re both asleep, but you’re going to have to lift it very quietly and very fast.” Of course, if anyone could do just that, it was these ladies. “I’ll keep an eye out. If you hear a ruckus outside, that’ll be me trying to distract a suspicious guard, so take it as a warning.”

My job as the magical lookout was nothing glamorous. People like Gentleman Jim Stacey or the Gray Fox, they were legendary as leaders and as the best in their trade—one day, Brynjolf, Vex, and Karliah would be legends like that. Maybe even Kynvind and the others. But no one was going to be passing down stories about me, sitting and freezing in on a rooftop while the real thieves put their lives on the line. I won’t pretend that what I did in the Guild was exciting. No, just minutes on end spent watching the house and surrounding streets like a paranoid weathervane, spells on my fingertips in case anything happened to threaten my guildmates inside.

And nothing happened to them. Everyone in the house slept soundly, and they moved swiftly, taking the locket with very little searching necessary.

Unfortunately, it was my position that was discovered.

By a crow.

I thought nothing of it as it landed beside me, squawked irritably, and waddled around for a minute. Ignoring it in favor of watching the mansion, I was caught by surprise when it mistook me for a frozen statue and fluttered its way onto the top of my hood.

“Waaghh!” The closest word I could use to describe what I did was ‘flailing,’ but I’m sure even that gives my gracefulness too much credit. I was sliding down the slick tiles like an avalanche, an angry crow shrieking around me, flapping its wings and no doubt wondering why its chosen spot to sit was making so much noise. Nearly at the bottom of the roof, it was my bandolier that caught the edge. Though I certainly didn’t want to dangle there helplessly, if I tried to get myself down, any more crashing and falling would only serve to draw guards in even more. As it was I held my breath and waited for the night watch to come around the corner and investigate. I slid toward the targeted house, thankfully, and not toward the street, so I had the darkness of the narrow alley to obscure me from the main street, and I was at least closer to my comrades.

So I decided to work with the hand I’d been dealt, red in the face as I may have been. Now hanging from the roof by my hip, I kept my eyes on the mansion and did my best to focus enough for another life detection spell. Everything appeared to be in order… the girls were headed down from the second floor, keeping close to the wall as I’d instructed. But in the distance, a figure was approaching from the other side of the house. Ah, there was that night watch I’d been waiting for. He moved at a leisurely pace, so he was just on his regular patrol route and didn’t appear alerted to our work or the sound of me rolling off of a building like an uncoordinated troll. But I couldn’t let him see me here, or see the thieves sneak out the back of the house.

There were at least a dozen ways I could distract him, one of which stood out as plainly as… a woman hanging from a roof. Worse came to worst, I could cover for them effectively without even trying, though I’d sorely prefer to avoid getting caught altogether.

All he had to do was glance into the little space between houses to see me. I fumbled in my bandolier for the vital vial, but it wouldn’t have enough time and I knew it. Kynvind and Karliah exited the house behind me. I drank the vial as quickly as I could, disappearing from view just as the two thieves emerged and made direct eye contact with the guard. He started down the alley for them, starting with a, “Hey, what are you up to?”

The two thieves did not need to be told to run in the opposite direction. As they went back toward the stone city walls, the guard started to pursue them, until, like an invisible spider poised on a web above him, I reached out and grabbed him around his head and shoulders.

“Wh—?!“ My paralysis spell stole the exclamation from his lips, and I fell with him to the snowy ground. His chain armor made him less than comfortable to land on, but it was better than nothing.

I ran after my cohorts and left the fallen, but uninjured guard on the guard.

When I at last caught up to them, wheezing and limping and holding my chest like I was sure my heart would burst, they regarded me with proud smiles and brief hugs. But we couldn’t celebrate just yet. Will that remained was to deliver the locket to our fence here in the city of snow, and then to head back home. Then we could relax.

Niranye’s house is as fine a home as an elf could ever hope for in Windhelm. To be honest, I’m not sure how she was able to procure it all, considering the overwhelming anti-elf sentiment especially prevalent in the controlling class of the city. Though she spent her evenings in the Grey Quarter, in the New Gnisis Cornerclub to be exact, she came home at night to a comfortable, spacious stone building in Valunstrad. Being a merchant was a good trade for her, and recently opening herself as a fence to the guild only further served to line her pockets.

Karliah tapped on the Altmer’s door, locket clutched in her other hand. The door opened and Niranye glanced over our heads to make sure there were no guards or nosy neighbors, before settling on us.

“May we come in?” Karliah asked, but Niranye answered with a firm shake of her head before the question was even completed.

“I have another guest,” the elf explained in a low, low voice. One golden hand reached out for the prize. “I’ll see that my end of the bargain is met.”

“A guest? But you knew we were coming tonight.”

“Yes, but he’ s not one to pick up on subtle clues such as, ‘it’s a bit late for company,’ or, ‘perhaps you could come tomorrow,’ or, ‘get out of my house.’” She glanced back over her shoulder and turned once again to aim a meaningful look at the Nightingale.

Karliah’s jaw tensed, and after a moment, she handed over the locket without any further complaint. Silently, as the door closed on us, the Dunmer waved us along. We were skittering down the icy avenue and out to the bridge without any words between us, and somehow, the air of celebration had been stolen by the mysterious exchange.

Wind at our backs, we were back in the carriage and setting off toward the south, Kynvind and myself passing uncertain glances back and forth all the while.

“Karliah?” Kynvind tried at last.

The nightingale smiled insincerely and waved the tension from the air. “It’s nothing. We narrowly avoided being discovered by someone who wouldn’t have taken well to the presence of three thieves. We should have been more careful than just knocking on Niranye’s door. It’s my own fault for not being more cautious.”

Something was missing from her explanation, but Kynvind and I let it go. There were a million things that could have gone wrong if we were discovered handing the stolen property to the fence, so the story would certainly do, though the distance gleam in her eyes had us worried for many miles.

Snow ebbed away to frost-covered grass and brush, but the steam never ceased to rise from the volcanic springs that we passed by even in the chill of late autumn. I watched the icy blue sky above and the glittering crystals across the red clay soil from the cart. By leg was hurting too badly to go out and collect ingredients along the road, but I would see about doing more jobs out and about to give me more opportunity to gather reagents not local to Riften. Oh, maybe I could go to Markarth! I could gather juniper, and maybe sneak a visit with Olev!

On a whim, not expecting much, I asked without looking away from the striking landscape, “Kyn, do you know what Bryn wanted me to ask you about?”

It was her silence that made me realize there was perhaps more to this than I thought. I glanced to where she sat, tucked in the corner of the cart. She was chewing on her ample lips.

“Did you hear her, Kyn?” Karliah said pointedly.

“You know I did,” the Nord grumbled. “What was the context—“

“Kynvind,” Karliah said. It sounded almost scolding.

Kynvind winced, but I didn’t get the impression that it was Karliah’s tone that bothered her. “You and Thrynn… You like him, right?”

“Of course I do. We don’t really hide it…”

“Yeah. Well, how much do you like him?”

“He’s my best friend in the guild.”

“And?”

I blushed. “I care about him a lot. We’re lovers. B-but, I mean, you know, we’re not—uh, I’m not going to—he hasn’t said anything about any more.”

“ _More_?” Kynvind repeated. “More than what? What do you think your feelings for him are _less_ than?”

“Don’t make this about her,” Karliah scolded again, like a mother trying to wring the truth from a deflective child.

And again, that same cringe wrinkled Kyn’s nose. “Sorry. Sorry. You should just know, while you were gone, Thrynn and I… spent time together. We were lovers. But we were definitely…” She searched for a word while I tried not to blanch in surprise. “What we had was _less_ than what you have.” Her lips turned downward into a defiant pout. “At least, I thought it was less. But if you’re not as serious about him as I thought…”

“No, I’m serious! I just know how it is with Nords, and how, you know… I’m perfectly serious. But I can’t be upset.” I wanted to be. I wanted to be insecure and compare her glorious chest to the flat plane I sometimes fancied to be breasts. I wanted to wonder if he missed her, or preferred her, or loved her. But I choked that down, and let the fire from my tongue burn in my belly instead. “That’s how it goes with Nords. If they’re even the least bit interested, they go to the temple. If he didn’t with you…”

Karliah leaned forward, waiting for me to continue. I didn’t know what else to say without embarrassing myself, so I just shrugged. A distinct sense of déjà vu twisted my guts.

“Are you saying Thrynn doesn’t love either of us because he didn’t ask either of us to get married?” Kynvind asked, sounding utterly baffled.

“I’m not saying that he doesn’t… I mean, I’m not going to make any assumptions about his feelings. I’m just saying, he’s not…”

“Serious?” Kynvind looked exactly like Brynjolf had when I had the same conversation with him a few days ago. Maybe I didn’t understand Nord relationships as well as I thought I had. “Alright, just out of curiosity, did you think that Farkas fellow wasn’t serious about you, either?”

“Farkas? What does he have to do with anything?” There was that déjà vu again. What was I missing here?!

“Well, do you?”

“No, of course not! He was just going through some things and…”

Kynvind burst out laughing. Karliah was shaking her head and hiding a chuckle behind her hand.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“In some ways, you and your brother have a lot in common. Like this. You can both be so oblivious when it comes to people. It’s incredible, really, and kind of sad. I wonder how many people have really cared about you, and you’ll never even know.”

I thought about my journal, worn with the worry of people I never imagined would care as much as they did. Maybe I was missing something after all.


	44. In Which She Asks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brina and Thrynn talk about their feelings. And yes, it takes a whole friggin' chapter.

I cleared my throat, but it wasn’t doing much good. So I just kept coughing and coughing, hoping she would stop talking, but she just wouldn’t. Before long I was hacking in earnest, choking desperately and praying for it to stop. If I actually suffocated, it would still be preferable to listening to this.

Bless her, she only wanted to help. And, as horribly intimidating it was to know that this busty, curvaceous, beautiful ice-blond had been bedding my—well, my whatever-in-oblivion he _was_ — there was no denying that all she wanted was to see us both happy. And she was trying so, so hard, and I knew that she must be swallowing her pride for our sakes right now. But I couldn’t bring myself to be grateful.

“Eye contact!” she said again. I had thrown myself over the side of the cart, honestly considering just throwing up to make her stop, and she answered by leaning over the edge with me. There was no escaping short of jumping off the moving carriage. “ _Prolonged_ eye contact. Practically the entire time. I think it’s an ego thing. If you have your eyes closed, he’s not sure that you’re thinking of him, or something like that. He likes knowing that you’re focused.”

“Hccchhkkrr!!”

“He can be really intense. But you should match his intensity! Really! He loves it! Fanning the flames, if you will. But eye contact, it drives him crazy! Just give him a little look.” I knew she was demonstrating the look she would use to seduce Thrynn right then, but I couldn’t bring myself to look. “It’s very easy.”

“ _Hrcchhrrrrcchhh!!_ ”

“And then, there’s the leathers. I’m sure you noticed it. He loves the guild armor on a woman. Leave the top unbuckled. Do you need some water?” Her hand, sporting a water skin, wiggled in my field of vision. “And he loves when you play with his hair. He only let me do it a few times. I think it’s really intimate, as far as he’s concerned, and I don’t think he was ever very comfortable with me doing it. But I’m sure he’d love it all the time from you!”

She was getting ahead of herself. Thrynn and I had no understanding of the nature of our relationship, and until recently, I was sure that our status as lovers only extended as far as friends with a distracting amount of sexual tension. We made love once, months ago, and since my return, shared some affection and hints of what might have been romance, but ultimately amounted to very little. Suddenly, I was also made aware that maybe he was more invested in me than I thought since, apparently, Nords might still care without instantly proposing marriage.

“Perhaps she has had enough,” Karliah generously suggested. Damn her. She’d been listening to this for nearly ten minutes without saying a word before now! “After all, she is receiving love advice from her lover’s former lover. You can see how that might be uncomfortable.”

“What? Brina’s not threatened! Thrynn and I were absolutely terrible for each other!” Despite her protests, she must have realized that Karliah had a point, and slid back down from the side of the cart. Her light blonde hair fell over one shoulder in a cascade of silken strands. Her high cheekbones and narrow nose were pink from the chill—not red and irritated like mine, but the soft pink of Timsa-come-by or some other stupidly beautiful thing. Though she didn’t wear her leathers on the road, her comfortable traveling clothes still showed off her cleavage like a priceless treasure on an altar. There was even a perfect little ray of sunlight always set on her chest. And why wouldn’t there be? Apparently the only thing about her that wasn’t perfect was the fact that Thrynn, for whatever reason I couldn’t figure out, did not love her.

Not threatened by Kynvind? She was even more intimidating than Aela. Only, whereas Aela could have lopped my head off, Kynvind would kill me a million ways with kindness.

It broke my heart, actually. I’m usually very bad at seeing people’s intentions and meanings, but even I could see how badly she wanted for us to be friends. She must have really cared for Thrynn, too, to be so determined to see him happy.

“Thank you,” I finally managed to say. “I… I do appreciate it. But we have a lot to figure out between the two of us, so…”

“What’s to figure out? He loves you! There’s you answer, no figuring out necessary! So skip the awkward, foot-shuffling discussion about feelings and love and take his clothes off!”

“I…” There was just no winning. “Thank you, Kynvind,” I relented at last, utterly defeated.

We would have to talk about it. There was just no getting around that.

The Rift in the autumn is an incredible sight. I’ve seen plenty of paintings and tapestries depicting the Rift, but they always show it in spring or summer! And, granted, it’s stunning in the more temperate months, I do pity most people never even consider what the region would look like in the autumn. They’re missing out. The golds and coppers in the foliage will take a thief’s breath away.

We rolled along, and there, from the fire-colored trees emerged the city. It was midmorning, and we could be seen plainly by the guard, but none of them said a word to us, questioned us, or gave us any grief whatsoever. In fact, one that was particularly pleased with his secondary income came to help us down from the carriage and opened the city gate for us.

“Not many cities give… people like us this kind of treatment,” I said warily, casting a suspicious glance over my shoulder.

“The guild fought hard to take this city,” Karliah assured me. “It has been hard-earned, but well worth it. Even if Maven Black-Briar becomes jarl, which she may if the Imperial forces press much harder and take the road north, cutting us off from Windhelm, we will still be the ones with the real influence. The Black-Briars have fallen considerably, and the guild stepped in to fill the void in power, and more.”

“No more bad luck or curses,” I breathed.

The Dunmer’s thin lips spread into a pleased smile. She came back to the guild right in time to see it restored to all its former glory, and to see them surpass it. “No more curse. This is Nocturnal’s blessing. As long as we walk in her shadow…” Her lavender eyes caught mine. “But you swear no fealty to Daedra.”

“I’m no one’s priest,” I said. Not to any Aedra, Daedra, or even my brother. In Olev’s wise words, the only person I could ever trust fully was myself, and to put my faith in divines was just asking to be let down one way or another. If Nocturnal continued to protect and take care of my guild, then that was all well and good. But if she didn’t, at least one of us wouldn’t be shocked or surprised or hurt, and hopefully I could help us keep our heads above water in the troubles to follow.

“No one asked you to be a priest, just to let her lead you,” Karliah said, waiting for me to admit that I secretly loved Nocturnal and—I don’t know, sacrificed cats to her or something, or whatever a Daedric worshipping zealots would be expected to do.

“Brynjolf is my leader. Then Vex, Delvin, and you. Nice and easy, and it doesn’t involve anything that may try to eat my soul later.”

She let it go after that. It wouldn’t be the end of it, but she was done for now.

We walked through the city and veered right from the main avenue, over the canal and into the market. Situated on a little island, with the canal looping it down below, it was bursting with life. Several stands were open since dawn, and the townsfolk milled around to the sound of prices and deals being hollered across the square.

I glanced quizzically at Karliah. What was there for us in the market? Why weren’t we going directly back to the cistern?

Kynvind looped her arm in mine, and we slithered through the crowd to the place where I first met the man who would be guild master.

Brynjolf no longer ran his little cons, but his old stand still stood, forgotten and defunct. But leaning against the old wooden structure was Vex herself. She wouldn’t wear her Nightingale armor out in the sunlight, in front of everyone, but she did wear her guild leathers shamelessly. Dark circles looped her eyes. Maybe she hadn’t slept since doing a job the night before, or maybe I just never noticed because I only ever saw her at night or in the Flagon where the lighting would have hid the blue rings. There were a few pickpockets among the crowd, no doubt, and Vex was there to act as a captain, keep them organized, and ghost them out of trouble if they got caught.

She looked Karliah up and down and grumbled, “You should tell Bryn that you’re back.”

“All in time. But first, I wanted to be sure that the city is clear before venturing too deep.”

“Our Dragonborn friend hasn’t been in the city, and there’s no word of him heading here,” Vex said. “Some bounty hunters roamed through looking for Etienne, but they were dealt. That’s it. It’s been a quiet week.”

“Any arrests?” Karliah asked.

Vex shook her head. “No major fuck-ups, and the guards don’t arrest for anything less these days. We’re in more danger of vengeful marks than the law.”

We knew this, but hearing it from Vex’s lips was almost surreal. We owned the city. _We owned the city._ I’d never thought of myself as powerful, or as being part of something so significant. My head got light just thinking about it, and I felt a bit jittery, like I didn’t know what to do with myself. What does one do when they _own a city?_

Now that we knew there wouldn’t be any unexpected surprises, either my brother or some unofficial voice of the law from a city outside our control, Karliah nodded for us to go back home. I hung back and whispered to Vex. I tried to sound nonchalant, and I might have accomplished it if my voice didn’t crack nervously three times. “Is Thrynn on a job right now?”

Her upper lip twisted, and for a moment I thought it was a snarl. No, never mind, she was smirking. The Nightingale answered, “Not a job, not really. He’s out here, actually. He’s on fishing duty.”

“Oh. Not his usual job.”

Vex shrugged. “Those potions you cooked up for him help. And he didn’t want to take any jobs outside the city until you got back.” Never one to beat around the bush, Vex.

“U-uhmm, right. Thank you.” So he was somewhere in the market. He could be anywhere, so rather than wander around and wait for a hand to pull at the purse on my hip, I climbed up the splintering wooden structure Vex leaned against. My feet planted against the counter’s surface, I held the awning for stability and twisted at my waist to look at the crowd behind me. Though I wasn’t much higher up, I could hopefully catch sight of mead-colored hair in the sunlight…

Damn it. There were just too many people. So rather than try to spot a thief skulking in the shadows of his prey, I would make myself visible. I held the awning tight with my left hand and rocked my weight further onto the balls of my feet to keep from falling backward. Then, I aimed my right hand upward into the air and released a plume of flames from my palm. Considering that I could see my breath in the crisp air, the sudden heat and brightness did not go unnoticed, and every head that turned my way piqued the curiosity of three others, until the wide square was all completely aware of me. Next to shouting his name all over town, this was probably as clear as I could get.

The fire died, but I stayed there, biting my lip as the people around me whispered under their breaths about the crazy mage making a fool of herself, just waiting…

A hand on my ankle scared me out of my skin, enough to have me dropping from my perch and right into Thrynn’s expectant arms. “You snuck up on me!” I gasped.

Dressed in his ruddy brown leathers, draped with a ragged linen cloak, Thrynn said in his gravelly voice, “What do you think I’ve been doing out here? Politely tapping people on shoulders? Getting their attention before robbing them?”

“Isn’t that more your style?” I teased.

He admitted with a roll of his eyes, “Yes. It is. Vex wanted me to get out, though, and Karliah thinks I need to practice my… _finesse_ , as she put it.”

“She wants you to not resort to violence as much.”

“That’s what I got from it. Take a nonaggressive approach and be out of sight before any confrontation has the chance to start.”

“Well, you’re a good sport for playing along.”

“It doesn’t hurt to know how to do it. Doesn’t make me any less capable of swinging my sword. And the real good sport is Vipir. He’s the one trying to teach me.” He cast a half-smile into the crowd, where our resident pickpocket must have still been out and about. “The more I can do, the more jobs I can be part of. Everyone wins. But sneaking around isn’t my area of expertise. I’ve had to break a few bones of people who’ve caught me,” he confessed. “Not exactly following Karliah’s perfect little plan of pacifism, but I’m getting better.”

It was about then that I realized he was still carrying me. I flailed just a little bit, but he didn’t set me down just yet. “I can stand. I’m fine—“

“I haven’t seen you in a fucking week,” Thrynn chastised. “Just…” I was about to prompt him to go on, but my answer was given in Thrynn not setting me down, but carrying me right out of the market.

“Where are we…?” I started to ask. By the time we were in the little alley, the one he threatened to cut my tongue out in many months ago when we were first reunited, he set me down and pressed my back on the wall.

Maybe he anticipated all the questions I had about what we were, or maybe it was that we indeed had not seen each other in a week, and our parting had been charged. Back against the Pawned Prawn’s decaying shingles, his hands went into my hair and his mouth hit mine. His body leaned in until he was directly against me, and in an effort to get closer, he positioned one of his feet between mine. I didn’t know what to do with my own hands, so I put one on his chest and draped the other over his back.

His hands roamed down from my hair, at first somewhat chastely at my neck and then further. The kiss deepened, and what little remained of my breath at this point was sighed into his mouth at the sensation of his hips pressing forward—

I heard a clanging clamor, and felt something smack against Thrynn’s arm. While I looked down to see a fancy purse, the latest in lady’s fashion with its strings cut, a voice hollered from the front of the alley, “Its broad fucking daylight!”

Thrynn threw the purse back in an over-arm shot aimed for the pickpocket’s head. “Mind your own business.”

But Vipir caught the purse and barked out a laugh. “You’re supposed to be learning how to sneak, and here you are finding a nice place right in the sunlight to do what even _normal_ people do in private! It’s pretty funny, actually. Shows what I’m working with. ”

“Fuck off.” But even after Vipir sauntered away, chuckling, Thrynn did not resume his affections. Instead, he just looked down at me like a sabrecat watching a rabbit, and placed one last hard kiss on my lips and began to compose himself to go back into the market.

“Uh, wait…” I steeled myself for a painfully awkward conversation, and maybe even a bit of heartbreak. I had to ask, though, just what we _were_. Because clearly I wasn’t getting it. “Thrynn—“

His red warpaint looked especially intimidating today. “It’ll be good for you, too.”

“What?”

“Training outside of your comfort zone. The Bal Molagmer is limited, and we need to be able to do more than just our specialties.”

I blanched. Suddenly, an embarrassing talk about the nature of our relationship was the least of my worries. “You mean—I need to learn to sneak around like Vipir, too?”

His outright laugh was both a relief and a tinge offensive. “No. We’ve all seen you trip over your own feet enough to know where your limitations are. But you should be able to defend yourself without magic. If you ever got into it, and ran out of magicka, you’d be screwed, and we all know it. Not to mention it wouldn’t hurt for you to get some muscle.”

“I don’t need muscle—“

“If you were hanging and had to pull yourself up from a ledge, could you?”

“I… could figure out… a way…” I cleared my throat. “No, I’d just fall. Or hang there until someone helped me.”

“Exactly. So when I’m done training with Vipir, _you_ are training with _me_. Tonilia should have a dagger set aside for you. We’ll see if we even get to the pointy stuff tonight, but we’ll probably start small. And work on building up some muscle on you. In the meantime, get some rest while you can.”

And he was gone, leaving me dreading our next meeting. Not only was there still the uncomfortable matter of our relationship, now our next opportunity to speak would entail me trying not to cut my own hands off. I cringed to imagine it, and slunk back to the cistern with my feet shuffling along the leaf-covered ground.

After I washed the road off and changed into a fresh, clean dress, I sighed to realize that I’d need to be in my leathers for this. It took so long to get into my gear that I still was fumbling with buckles, some laces from somewhere dangling uselessly from my neck, when Thrynn returned.

“This is an ominous start,” he chuckled, coming to my aid. “Here to teach you how to fight, and you can’t even get dressed by yourself.”

“Yeah, well, I’d like to see how well you’d do if I had to teach you to cast a spell!” I huffed in frustration.

He chuckled again, conceding the point, and led me into the training room. It was a place I tried to stay out of, as I’d only ever be in the way here. Niruin was poking at one of the master locks set in the corner, idly taking it apart and putting it back together with swift hands. He could do it without even watching what he was doing, so he could instead watch what was bound to be a hilarious spectacle.

“Um, about the dagger, I didn’t get it from Tonilia—“

“That’s fine. We’re starting with some basics. Necessities.” Thrynn didn’t let me get to the dummies, but positioned me right in the middle of the empty space at the center of the large square room. Lanterns flickering around made shadows dance along the stones, but the sense of isolation and privacy, even with Niruin in my peripheral, let me a bit of comfort.

The highwayman started by positioning my body. His calloused hands took me by the shoulders and straightened my back, adjusted my head, and then lifted my legs by my knees to reposition my feet. “Start with a strong stance. Have your weight distributed, and keep balanced. If you fall, you’re as easy as a target gets. Now, humor me. Just throw a punch.”

“I don’t want to hurt you. Can’t I use a dummy?”

“If you manage to hurt me, I’ll buy the whole Flagon drinks. But I want to see just what I’m working with.”

Swallowing my considerable trepidation, I balled my fist—

“You’ve got to be—get your thumb out of your fist! You’re going to break it!”

I ignored Niruin’s chortles and did as I was told, then smacked my knuckles against Thrynn’s chest.

“Well?”

“It was adorable.” That didn’t sound like a compliment, though. “But you at least have some form. You leaned your weight into it, without just falling forward like I thought you would. It’s a start. Whenever you can help it, stand like that. Keep moving, but remember how it feels to have your body firm and to not be falling all over the place. Keep your balance, and always try to have control over the situation.”

I thought he was going to teach me how to kill, but as the exercises went on, a theme was emerging. He started by grabbing my wrist, and instructed me in how to turn and pull my arm to escape him. Then, he showed me other various ways someone might grab me—the arm, the neck, my hair, from the front and from behind, and showed me how to get out and away. The only time he taught me how to throw a good punch or kick was when he showed me where to hit so that I could put distance between myself and an opponent, or how to incapacitate them for a clean getaway. It wasn’t as easy as it all sounded, and though I knew he was going very easy on me, I would be spotted with bruises my tomorrow.

“This is all defensive,” I pointed out.

“If you’re out of magicka, you won’t be on the offense,” Thrynn said. “And if you keep going on jobs, you’re going to keep getting into dangerous situations. I want you to get out of them in one piece.”

It was… remarkably sweet, even if he had been demonstrating a strangle hold on me only minutes earlier. He punctuated that thought by lunging in for another grab. I floundered for a moment as his arms coiled around my waist, and I rattled the ways he’d taught me thus far to extract myself from grapples in my head.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Quit struggling and let me kiss you.”

“Oh, so now Thrynn’s getting into character,” Niruin teased. “Great. He’s going to try to frighten you now to better simulate an attack—“

I ignored him and kissed my teacher obediently. “I hope that wasn’t supposed to be a test—“ Another kiss. When did he get so… affectionate? Was he always this sweet? What did I miss? “Thrynn… if we’re taking a break from practicing here, maybe we could… talk a bit? In private?”

Who was I kidding? There was no privacy in the cistern and I knew it, but Niruin got the hint and disappeared none the less. Everyone could hear through the echoing sewer systems anyway.

Thrynn stepped away, popping his knuckles just by clenching his fists. “What?”

“I just… wanted to ask. I wanted to be _clear_.”

“Alright.”

“About… um, well, about…”

He rolled his eyes. “This is painful, Brina. Just say it.”

“Are we lovers? I mean, I know we’ve made love, but are we… the two of us…?”

If he wasn’t looking at me like an idiot child, I suspect he might have laughed. “What the fuck else would you think we are?”

I began to flounder, wincing at myself. “I… don’t know. I mean, friends, of course, and…”

“You think I kiss _Rune_ like that?”

“Well, not… No. No, I don’t.” I felt a whole new blush sweep across my cheeks as I pictured just that. “Unless… do you? Have you?”

“That grin is worrying. Whatever you’re imagining, stop.” He swept a hand through his messy mane, a tangled mess after our training. “You’re missing the point. This is not friendship. This is not a casual affair. This is more than either of those.” His soft brown eyes locked on me, and once again I was a lone traveler in the snow, looking up at the bandit on Helgen’s wall.

I almost asked how much more we were, exactly. I expected that sentimental things like that would have to be pried by force from him, if they ever came out at all.

But Thrynn also wasn’t the sort of man to beat around the bush. Subtlety was not his language. And before I had to prod or ask him to explicitly define his feelings for me, he just came right out and said it, “I love you.”

“O- _oh_ …. Wow…” My head felt floaty, like I’d just drank mazte too fast. And my extremities felt a little numb, as if I’d had too much mead to drink. “That’s… good to finally have right out there.” My shoulders felt lighter already.

“I was going to show you how to break a nose into someone’s face, but that can wait until tomorrow,” Thrynn offered. Was I supposed to find that romantic? Because I almost did. “For now… fuck it. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I didn’t know how you’d take it. _If_ you’d take it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry about it. The point is, you don’t look appalled or angry, and I’ll take it. Let’s go somewhere.”

“Uhmm… where, exactly?”

“Plankside is mostly empty this time of night. That alley from before might just be the most private place in the city between midnight and dawn.”

I was flushing madly. “You don’t... But the cistern—“

“Is full of people, and there’s nowhere to hide. The sewers of the Ratway are alive with the usual late-night business, and all the rooms in the Barb will be rented by now.”

My face felt like it was made of hot coals. I could scarcely speak.

“What? Don’t tell me Sanguine’s ‘high priestess’ is too shy to—“

“No! It’s not that at all! I just… I didn’t even say that I loved you back yet. I thought maybe you… didn’t think… or were trying to convince me somehow…”

“I know already how you feel, Brina. You don’t know shit about how to love, because you were taught by a selfish bastard who abandoned you, and I’m not going to hold that against you.”

“You… did you think I would react like my brother? Run away?”

“I thought you would be confused. And you are. You turned a confession into an excuse to imagine my tongue in Rune’s mouth. But I knew what I was getting into with you. So come with me. To Plankside. And I’ll make it as simple and straightforward as I can, so you don’t have anything to be confused over.”

“I love you,” I answered through a thick lump in my throat.

“Good. So we’re on the same page.” Then he took my hand and led me out of the training room, out of the sewer, and into the crystal-clear moonlight.


	45. In Which She Gets Her Leg Hurt... Worse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Radiant quests!! While Brina is off doing a Sweep Job for the guild, someone else has been assigned a quest as well, and paths may cross.

Knots of nightshade crunched under my feet into little shards of ice. Despite the layer of crystal cold that enveloped everything, I was the only one making any noise—somehow, everyone else managed to move with such a perfected sneaky step that even frost wouldn’t crackle under their weight. Every other step from me was particularly noisy, as my wounded leg responded to the cold and the long journey to this point by clumping like a log in a boot.

A house in the wilderness. Some wealthy bastard who made a fortune on underpaying the fishermen who worked on his boat, then retired away to enjoy the spoils of their labor far from the sounds of their dissent. A story all too common, for when did the powerful not take advantage of the weak? This line of work was making me a cynic. But we were singers of a different tune. We were the Bal Molagmer. And if he didn’t want to give the people what they deserved, then we _would_. For us, two wrongs _did_ make a right.

Two days from Falkreath, off the main road, northeast, in a fine little clearing surrounded by snow-dusted pine trees, stood his “cabin.” _He_ called it a cabin, anyway, but mansion was more like it. It had a stunning view of the lake, dominating the hillside itself. Who needed so much space? According to Bryn, that ostentatious display of a home included a whole wing just for trophies of incredible beasts, and a library filled with rare books. Another huge portion of the house was his bedroom-- _just_ his bedroom. He lived alone, save for his housecarl, to whom he paid nothing save for the privilege to care for his property and wait on him.

Was this the kind of man my brother would be? Would he retire from being a hero, to live rolling around in his riches and singing his own praises, all alone? The man was selfish, cruel, dangerous. Surely that was his preferred future; if I thought he’d ever want to come back to a plot of mud in the shadow of Kvatch, to spend his days with me, with _anyone_ , I was truly naïve. I swallowed down the thought with a reminder of the happier things.

Like how far west I was! I never thought I could go this deep in Thalmor-controlled territory ever again, but for once, I wasn’t afraid. I caught Kynvind’s eye with the thought, and smiled. Her blades never went to work on the innocent, or even the guilty, for that matter. But she would fight to defend me, of that I could be certain. She smiled, and, with her friendly expression twisting into a knowing smirk, tapped her fingertip to her cheek.

What was she…? I followed her implied instructed to drag of gloved digit along my face, and pulled the velvet back to see… a smear of red. As always, I started at the sight until I recalled, once again, that it was not blood. No, just the red stain of war paint.

Which drew my attention to the one male in our party, and no small part of my decision to go out with the group into Imperial terrain. Thrynn, his own face streaked with unruly ochre, had only applied it an hour ago when we first woke up, right before we set out in the dead of night to close in on our target and go through with the operation. But in that hour, we’d found a chance to sneak away, if only for a couple minutes. Hence his ruined paint. I just pursed my lips and tried not to giggle. That damn war paint got everywhere.

After that night in the alley, I’d nearly had a heart attack when I saw all the red he’d left behind in the light. I thought I’d been bleeding everywhere, but no, it was just makeup all over my body, horrifyingly concentrated at the region between my legs. Amazing how those four lines could make such a damn mess.

We had three hours until dawn. Right on schedule, we made it to the house. The old recluse and his manservant would be sleeping, and we would be able to clean out a fortune of stuff before either of them were any the wiser. Not that we would rob him blind. He had too much stuff, and we’d need every thief in the guild and every cart in Riften to get all the crap he owned out. No, we’d just take everything we could carry, and maybe hit him again another day if we needed to. But supposedly, he had some items so valuable, we could walk out with just a couple items and be able to fence them for years’ worth of fishermen salaries. His workers would finally see their hard-earned money, and we wouldn’t need to break our backs to do it.

And for once, I wasn’t staying outside playing lookout.

The cold air burned my lungs, and all I could think was how nice it would be to go inside the warm manor. Kynvind led the way along the side of the house, up a set of stairs to a balcony and side door. Multiple entrances and exits, I took note of every window that I could possibly squeeze through, or wall that might be torn open with a well-placed fireball. Kynvind made short work of the simple lock, and all at once the house breathed hot air out at us. I could feel the snow of my eyelashes melt away in an instant as we slipped inside the huge house. How many fires were still burning this late? Was I just so cold, or was this house a degree from bursting into flames?

I rubbed my velvet gloves together, shaking all over from the sudden change in temperature, while Thrynn stepped ahead to take the lead. If anyone was going to run face-first into a formidable steward or angry resident, Thrynn would insist it be him. Once, Kynvind got punched while on a job with him. It left him furious even days later when he got back and told me about it, and I knew that he would take it even worse if I got hurt on his watch. He was teaching me to be stronger, to take on an attacker with brute force if my magic ever failed me, but I admit it made me feel far safer to know that he would put himself in the middle if such an event ever arose. He wasn’t one to stand idly by when a fight broke out, especially if any of the women of the guild were mixed up.

Silent, save for the crackle of dying fires and my own clumsy footfalls, we glanced around the upper level of the main hall. Mostly storage. Kynvind gave the boxes and chests a cursory look, then waved us downstairs, where we split up.

I took the library. It was why I’d been brought inside on this mission, in fact. My time with the college had been short, but I had been in their library enough to spot an especially old, special tome when I saw one. If anything jumped out as especially magical, I was to nab that, too. We were looking to fence these off to discerning clients Solitude, Bryn said. I had to be thorough.

Thorough!! The library was a single spire filled with books. Filled. The shelves that lined the walls were overflowing, and this man was a _collector_. There was nothing in here that didn’t hold _some_ value! I had to figure out the best, and quickly, without anyone knowing I was trespassing. The lucky thing is that if you spend enough time with Bryn, you start thinking in Septims. The age of the cover, the quality and condition of the binding, the purity of the gold leaf and names stamped into the leather, I translated them as best I could into a monetary value, and pulled the books that gave me a distinct feeling that they were worth more than _me_.

There was a pile at my feet up to my thigh by the time I’d worked my way once around the first level of shelves and a tap on my shoulder startled me out of my skin.

Thrynn, warpaint still smeared, glanced down at the books and raised his brows. I shrugged, winced, and bent down to try tucking them into the backpack I’d brought along. Those that didn’t fit, I pushed into the empty bag over my shoulder. I squeezed two more into my satchel. And there were still more that Thrynn was putting into his own backpack.

Each step tempted fate. I felt my whole body sway with the weight of the books. Gods help me if I had to run, because I was certain I couldn’t. My left leg buckled painfully every time I dared put the unforgiving load on it. Thrynn grabbed my arm, and I braced myself against him as he helped me along. Kynvind joined us by the large dining table, still stuffing shiny bits into every available pocket on her bandolier, her eyes sparkling with elation and justice.

She did it for the justice, after all, and she really meant it. She lived off the Guild supplies, never had extra funds for drinks or treats for herself. If you ever asked, she said it was still the most comfortably she’d ever lived. Being poor was one thing, she insisted. Being destitute, helpless, forgotten, starving? That was something else entirely.

We went right out the front door, like welcome guests, and just as the door closed behind us, we heard the first holler. Shit. But they wouldn’t find us, even if I couldn’t run properly. We were all in the forest before he even got outside. Dressed in dark leathers, we were one with the shadows and all but nonexistent. I could shuffle along at my own weighed-down pace, and though my heart thundered in my chest all the while, we wouldn’t be caught. Not tonight.

My first time actually being inside on a burglary, and I didn’t get discovered, or my guildmates captured! We were successful! I was a _thief_ , and yet there was no pang in my conscience, just an overwhelming feeling of rightness, of belonging.

We collapsed back at our campsite, tucked away under some concealing outcroppings of rock, and warmed ourselves around the fire under furs as we laughed and compared our loot. Thrynn, who’d been assigned the trophy room, had little to go off of. Everything was too big to just carry out, so he’d gone through some of the main hall and picked up a few nice baubles lying around. Kynvind got the bedroom. The most dangerous location, sure, but she was quiet and swift enough not to wake the resident, and it had the best booty. Gold, silver, coins and jewelry. The man had a penchant for thick ropes of metal, finished with flashy pendants, and apparently he wore them so often that they were just laying around.

Clearly, he’d never expected that he’d get unwelcome visitors like us living out in the middle of nowhere. There was no concern for the security of his home whatsoever!

As for my books, well, I was confident that we had a fortune, but I would save the actual appraisal to Tonilia and Bryn. No point in getting worked up just yet, I figured.

We ate, talked about what a weird man that last target was, and then went to bed to get what sleep we could before we started back toward home at dawn. And Thrynn put a little more of his paint on my body.

Even distributing the weight of my books, I spent all the next morning staggering behind. “Could we stop to rest?” I asked. The sun had only just come up, and I was barely putting one foot in front of the other.

“I can take some more of those books,” Thrynn offered. He already had most of them.

And, though I started to shake my head, I paused and, at last, relented. “I think you might have to. My leg isn’t taking this well.” The trek through the mountains was the shorter route, but with the weather, we’d gone and taken the long route north from Riften, rounding the Throat of the World, and crossing through Riverwood. That road was a long one, wrought with steep hills and everything else to make my perpetually wounded leg irritated. Perhaps this was just too much for it.

I sat down on a rock overlooking the lake and pulled my boot off to give the limb a break. “Oh… That’s not good at all,” I groaned. Thrynn and Kyn both looked my way quizzically, and I lifted my foot up to show the swollen, red appendage. “I can… fix it enough for now. But we may need to…”

Stop in a town? That was putting it too lightly. My leg had been difficult and painful, but always holding on, up until now. Now, I didn’t think that likely anymore. I’d been too hard on it, and it never really healed right to begin with.

“We can stop in Riverwood,” Thrynn offered. “Alvor will take us in for a couple days while you rest and heal it.”

Healing is one thing. I can heal, and I can heal really _well_. But this leg did not want to be healed, and it was damage done so long ago that I wasn’t sure how much I could repair. Especially if I had to repair it myself.

“That would be good,” I sighed. It was a start, at least. I swallowed thickly to imagine how I’d tell them just to leave me behind, if I could go no further. They’d never accept that.

He carried more of those books than he should have. He would have carried _me_ , too, but there just weren’t enough of us, and we couldn’t leave behind all our stolen goods on the road. Kynvind let me use her as a crutch, and sometimes it wasn’t that bad. It took easily twice as long as it should have to get to Riverwood, though, and that meant that we were low on supplies, haggard, and exhausted when we at last came into town.

Alvor and Thrynn embraced like old friends, exchanged a few words, and that was it. We were in the house that I stayed in when I first came to Skyrim, that easy. All I’d needed to say to Alvor that first time was that I _knew_ Thrynn, and he happily let me stay. Now, with Thrynn with us in the flesh, we were guests of honor. Little Dorthe sat on my lap all through supper.

“We’re on our way to Riften,” Thrynn explained over his bowl of stew. He always kept details to a bare minimum, and Alvor never pried for more. “But Brina’s leg is bad. We need to rest a bit and get more rations for the rest of the way home, anyway, so we’ll be going to the trader first thing in the morning, too.”

“You’re welcome for as long as you need,” the grizzly smith said. He cast a glance at his wife, who, after a considerable moment to assess Kynvind and myself, offered a sort of sideways nod of acceptance. “See? You’re family. I can also sharpen your blade and see to any repairs you might need. May as well, while you’re in town.”

“That’d be good,” Thrynn agreed. They made a very manly sound at each other, like a growl-laugh-scoff, and that was that, apparently.

“You’ll need to be ready, anyway,” Alvor continued, bringing his battered tin tankard to his lips. “What with all the dragons. It’s getting worse. The Companions sent out a small force to take down the one spotted flying just down the river.”

My stomach sank. Behind my eyelids, I imagined black wings unfolding casting a single great shadow across all of Tamriel. And whose fault was it? Mine.I was the one who chose this fate for the world. Here I was, blissful and enjoying my life with the thieves, almost forgetting that the world was about to end either way. But it was this, or the Thalmor would truly destroy everything. Better to end a single Kalpa than to see all that ever was or ever could be unraveled by the collective god-complex of the Altmer.

I told myself that, but my hands were shaking around Dorthe’s narrow shoulders, nails curling into her flaxen dress like a child’s stuffed toy for comfort.

“The dragons have been getting worse?” Kynvind asked.

“More numerous, at least,” Sigrid chimed in from the other side of the table.

Of course they were. They were dominating the world. They were eating it—

“Especially since the Dragonborn declared war on Alduin a couple of weeks ago. Went up to the top of the Throat of the World again, so they say. I swear, we could hear him shouting all the way down the mountain. They say he can shout dragons out of the sky! The dragons are angry, but we have hope.”

I couldn’t breathe.

Sigrid went on, smiling serenely at her daughter, “They can throw a fit all they want, They’re out in full force. But only because they know that the Dragonborn can defeat them.”

“When I grow up, I want to be a Dragonborn!” Dorthe declared.

“Hopefully they won’t be needed anymore by then,” Sigrid chuckled.

“He did _what?_ ” My throat was so dry, it was barely a breath, just a hoarse whisper of surprise. “He… he’s going to…”

“Save the world. Such is the prophecy,” Alvor said.

“Of course he is. Of course.” My eyes were stinging. “Because he’s a hero…Of course he would… Excuse me, Dorthe. I need to go outside.”

Thrynn was standing at the same time as me. I held up a hand and waved him down. “I just need some air.”

He wasn’t satisfied with that answer, not at all, but he begrudgingly dropped back into his seat and nodded for Kynvind to relax as well.

It wasn’t as though I could get far with my leg in its current condition, anyway. I wasn’t going to run away, I just needed to breathe.

He was going to save the world after all. That’s not how the scholar said it would happen! We hadn’t been brought back together, he never saw hide nor hair of me, let alone even know that I was in Skyrim at all! Where had I gone wrong?

And what did it say about me that I was devastated that the world wouldn’t be devoured after all?

I limped away from the smithy, ignoring the pain of my leg. They lived on the edge of the town, so I didn’t need to go far to leave the city walls. The river to one side, wilderness on the other, and a path ahead that, if I followed it a day, would lead me to the guardian stones. I chose the Thief, to keep me hidden. And for what? Hidden or not, we were all doomed anyway. Had my time spent alone for so long been for naught?

I missed Olev, so much so that I’d dared to send him a letter before going off on this mission. I missed Cicero. I missed Arvid and Farkas and Aela and Arcadia and Elrindir and Ambarys and Suvaris, and until recently I’d lost all of the Thieves Guild, too. My life since coming to Skyrim was lonely and painful, and if I’d known, I’d have just stayed in Kvatch! Homeless or not, I’d make do as an urchin on the city streets! Better than being alone, being pulled away from everyone I ever dared to care for, or knowing that the ultimate destruction of Mundus was on my hands!

The bottom of the wall made for a good enough spot to crumble and cry for a bit. It had been years since I cried, but that one night, confronted by the Listener in all his terrible glory, had reduced me to a child. It was so easy to cry, now that I had seen my nightmares all come true one by one.

At first, I thought it was my own soft sobs echoing in the darkening dusk, but the rumble grew louder, until I finally had to look up.

Against the grey sky, it looked like a broken side of a mountain, sharp, jagged edges of metallic scales screaming through the air, falling lower and lower.

I could scarcely breathe. It had been months since I last saw a dragon, and this one was… big! It brought with it an aura of terror, that as I looked up at it, my feet refused to move and my spells were all at once lost to me in a jumble of inward screams.

The ancient dragon’s maw opened wide, and it shouted on the wall and down the main avenue of the town a stream of ice and cold, like a blizzard was pouring directly out from its throat. Where the ice hit, it bloomed up like spears of broken glass and the frost crawled in all directions along the dirt.

As though the bastard knew that I was in a dark place, and just felt compelled to make it darker! There it went, swooping back around to attack the city again, until it abruptly turned around and careened back to the east. Then I saw it, barely glinting in the dim torchlight of the town, a streak of iron. An arrow. Someone outside the village was trying to bring the beast down. And, stupid, stupid me, I started immediately after it.

Thrynn was tough, but he fought like a bandit, not a dragon hunter. His methods and skills were far more suited to dismembering men than battering a fully armored beast of legend. And Kynvind could use her daggers well enough to get out of a tight situation, but combat was far from her area of expertise. She’d have to get in too close to even touch the dragon, and she wouldn’t live long enough to retreat.

Whoever was shooting arrows at it, however, had to know a thing or two. They predicted the dragon’s movements, and were able to fire arrow after arrow continuously in anticipation of where it would be a split second later. I snuck past the smithy, because I knew that neither Kynvind nor Thrynn would ever allow me to run into a dragon fight, but I couldn’t let them risk themselves by getting involved.

They could be livid with me later. Better than them being dead.

Adrenaline helped me to ignore the searing pain of my leg, just long enough to stumble through the small town and to the other side, where the beast was roaring and generally causing a ruckus. But there was another roaring voice - no, two. _Three_ roaring voices. My heart raced as I charged through the town’s wall, fire on one hand, restorative white light on the other.

Powerful jaws snapped in my direction, but not at me. Teeth like a row of deadly daggers aimed instead for the bearlike silhouette of a man, encased in armor that may or may not have been up to the challenge. We didn’t get the chance to find out, as instead of biting into steel, the dragon’s mouth instead chomped uselessly against my barrier spell.

The Companion chopped his sword through the barrier, and it parted around his blade as though he were slicing through a sheer, shimmering curtain. The tip of his weapon nicked the monster’s snout, but it backed up before he could heave the heavy two-hander around to strike again.

As it backed up, it was pursued by both Farkas, and an ongoing volley of arrows from Aela.

She glanced my way, at first surprised, then annoyed. There was no hint of recognition, probably because I was dressed head to toe in leathers, complete with a snow-covered leather hood. She opened her mouth, no doubt to tell me to back off and stay out of their way, until I stumbled forward to go after the dragon.

The moment my left foot hit the ground and my weight shifted painfully, a light sparked in her eyes. She’d spent weeks watching that limp, after all. “Brina?” No longer frustrated or burdened by my presence, she reconsidered the orders she’d almost given. Without pausing her assault on the dragon, she shouted, “Farkas and I have it under control for now! Right now, Ria’s the one who needs help!”

“Where-?” I didn’t need to finish. I just had to notice the streak of blood on the ground and the frost-covered body in the grass. The frost covered her in a mist of white, which, as I practically fell at her side, I brushed from her face hurriedly, not caring that my velvet Bal Molagmer gloves were getting wet. Healing energy went into her, but I kept looking over my shoulder, watching Farkas and Aela and the dragon. If there was anything that wouldn’t stop a man like Farkas, it was a maelstrom of ice and snow. No, he waded into the dragon’s cone of coldness like stepping out of Jorrvasker on a chill morning. I wondered how much more he could take before the joints on his armor froze, or the steel became brittle. I would heal Ria, that was my first and foremost priority, but I itched to get out there, to be by his side and to protect him as only a mage could. Stupid Companions, thinking that magic was creepy! It saved their damn hides!

Ria choked something about being fine. I ignored her, save for pulling a crystal vial from my bandolier and emptying it into her complaining lips. A tonic for the cold, to warm her off and to help her stave off any hypothermia. It only took a minute or two, but that was a minute I wished I could have been on the front lines. As soon as I was sure that Ria was alright, I was trying to pull myself to my feet. It was the previously fallen Companion who took me by the elbow and hoisted me up in spite of my damaged leg.

Farkas was swinging his whole body with the weight of his greatsword, and for every chop of the massive weapon, a few more shards of scale chipped away, and the snowy earth became more and more spackled with red. Farkas showed no signs of slowing, but the cold wore his skin red and chapped. Some of that blood was his.

Too long, it was taking too long just to take a few steps! Luckily, Ria dragged me along behind her as she went back into the thick of it herself. I threw my left hand for a barrier around our tight formation, and it my right I made a ball of fire, which I sent its way with an underhanded toss. Fire burst over its face, crackling where heat met frozen blood.

While Ria hesitated to get close to the torrent of fire, Farkas didn’t fear my flames. He just kept chop-chop-chopping away, his blue eyes sparkling.

Wings spread wide, and with an angry shout that shook the world, it flapped once. Between the wind and the unrelenting force of its voice, the three of us all fell backwards. I skipped like a stone across the ground, only coming to a stop when I hit Aela. She was kneeling, and it was a good thing because if she hadn’t been anchored, I would have taken her out.

“On your feet!” she hissed.

“Where in Oblivion are the town guards?!” I exclaimed.

“We told them not to get in the way!” Aela answered, yanking me up with her. “The watch here is just a bunch of common folk given swords. They wouldn’t stand a chance against it. We told them just to focus on keeping the townspeople far away from the dragon.”

That explained why Thrynn didn’t come running out when the sounds of battle erupted and I was nowhere to be seen. I flinched to imagine him fighting with the guard now, trying to get to the battlefield. He would know I’d be here, too.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

Aela nocked another arrow to answer me, and I nodded. She was well enough to keep going, and I shouldn’t expend precious magicka on scrapes and bruises.

I snapped my fingers, and the healing magic disappeared with a flutter of glitter and was replaced by a compact inferno with all the heat of the Skyforge. This one I threw over Farkas’s head.

Farkas hadn’t landed very far from the ancient dragon, but his heavy armor made him a bit slower at getting back to his feet. He shielded his eyes from the glare of my blast, and the dragon recoiled, but only for a moment, before snapping at the fallen Companion once again.

Ria had repositioned herself to flank the monster, but even as she skittered around the dragon’s side, she was struck hard by the full force of the dragon’s tail. It knocked her from her feet, and yet again she was flat on the ground.

We wouldn’t be killing this thing any time soon if we all just kept on falling down!

“Aela,” I cried, remembering the last time I’d fought a dragon and Cicero’s dagger burning white-hot in the back of the dragon’s throat, “when it opens its mouth, aim inside! Make it so that it can’t shout!”

“Don’t tell me--”

“This isn’t my first dragon!” It wasn’t Aela’s, either, but that was beside the point. For being a milk-drinking weakling mage, I knew what I was talking about, and I’d seen the tactic work before. Then again, it was me, my two boys, and a whole squadron of Stormcloaks who took that last one down, and in my first fight, it was all of the Whiterun guard and every able-bodied fighter, brawler, mage, and Companion in the city. How were we supposed to do this all on our own, three fighters and one limping apothecary?

Then again, these were the strongest warriors this side of Tamriel, and I was a lot more powerful now than I was before.

Maybe we really could take this thing.

As quickly as I could get to him, I positioned myself behind Farkas. Now that he was standing, I was completely eclipsed by his broad body. Another barrier went up around us. “I’ve got you covered! Don’t let up!”

I drew in a fearful breath as the dragon’s massive jaws went wide, and the start of a word rumbled ominously in a swirl of building mist.

And there was that arrow! Aela, with her aim as precise and perfect as ever, sent three arrows, one after another, each one humming wickedly in the air past my ears and impacting hard inside the cavernous maw. “Keep it up!” I hollered.

Meanwhile, I was standing behind Farkas and wading in with him as he swung and swung. With my barrier holding strong, there was nothing the dragon could do but accept Farkas’s brutal battering. Ria was standing again, and though that tail had knocked the wind out of her, she found a relatively safe spot on the dragon’s side where she could chip away at its scaly armor and encourage its bleeding a bit more.

The dragon swung its head on its serpentine neck in search of the pest on its side, its shout nothing more than an aggravated roar but its teeth deadly as ever.

Ria’s shield caught the bite, but it was sacrificed in favor of her arm. As splinters fell at her feet, there was no doubt she felt more relief than frustration.

But that got me thinking. This beast didn’t like being flanked. It didn’t like when it couldn’t knock us all down at once, or when it couldn’t catch us all in one bite.

My barrier fell. I tore the cork from a vial of oily blue liquid, drank it down, and enacted a spell that had gotten significantly more use as a full-time member of the Thieves Guild.

That dragon would have a tough time taking out flanking opponents when it couldn’t see them!

Now invisible as a whisper on the wind, I hurried to the dragon’s other side. I tried to stay far enough away that it couldn’t get me with a sweep of its tail, and loosed a firebolt. Thanks to my constantly regenerating stream of magicka from my potion, I quickly enacted the spell again, and moved further back and toward its behind. If my potions weren’t as powerful as they are, I wouldn’t have been able to keep it up. But once, twice, three times, I shot a spell and went invisible, moving in different directions with each hit.

It screamed in fury and pain, but its snapping jaws could not find me. After my third strike, the dragon lunged its head and nearly devoured me at once. I felt the temperature drop as it got close, and the primordial cold from its mouth as it closed down on the space directly in front of me. Too close for comfort, but the tactic was working! The dragon not only had an annoying fly buzzing around it, but I was doing significant damage, and distracting its ire so that Farkas and Ria could get in close.

Maybe it was so intent to kill me because I was hurting its pride with my flittering in and out of existence. Maybe I was hurting it even worse than it looked. Whatever the case, the dragon was still chomping and sweeping its claws in search of me when I heard a victorious cry.

And the biting stopped.

For a moment, the dragon looked confused. Utterly baffled. Its angry eyes found me, and I was sure that despite my current invisibility, it saw me purely by the force of its own indignant will.

Three for three.

Three dragons met, three dragons slain. I let the invisibility spell dissolve, and stood over its huge dead head with amazement and pride plastered on my stupid face. My mouth was probably hanging open, too. I’m sure I looked positively foolish.

Farkas was pulling his sword out from the dragon’s throat, and Aela was saying something about Ria being healed again and the junior Companion sternly refused. When he got the weapon out, he didn’t bother to sheathe it, or even to wipe the blackish-red blood from its shining steel. The sword fell to the ground, and it two long bounds, he was in front of me, throwing his arms around me, swinging me around like his sword. It probably weighed as much as I did, anyway.

“Farkas! Be carefu--” I was glad to see him. He was a good friend and I really did owe him a proper apology. I left him behind, not at all realizing that he felt for me. I led him on, and poor thing, I walked out without giving him any closure. We were on two entirely different pages throughout our whole relationship.

And, I realized as his lips hit mine, we were _still_ on two different pages after all.

When he ended the kiss, he was beaming ear-to-ear. “When you left, you didn’t say when you’d be back, or when I’d see you again! And we were too distracted by the Tomb of Ysgramor, I forgot to ask! This whole time, I’ve been hoping to run into you! Did your guild friends find you? Is that where you’ve been?”

Oh. Oh, Mara.

“You should come back with us. You don’t have to stay. I understand that you’re not a Companion, and that’s fine. But you should visit. Arvid will be happy to see you!”

Oh. Please, please stop. My gut wrenched. I wanted to say something, to stop him, but the guilt was making me ill. Somewhere in the village, Thrynn was probably fighting with some guards to try and get to me, to protect me. And here I was, just standing around the cold corpse of a malicious aspect of Akatosh, with the death of the universe on my shoulders, being the worst human alive.

“Gods, I have missed you!” And he kissed me again. This time, when he released me, he set me back down on my feet. He bent over to look me in the eyes, his crystalline blue optics alive with victory and elation and _I was such a horrible person, why did he have to look at me like that?!_ His hand brushed my cheek. “Brina, your face! Are you…?” He inspected the smear of red on my face, and then looked down to inspect the slick of red that had rubbed off on his hand. “Huh. No cut after all. Well, that’s good. Thought you were bleeding!” And then he kissed me again.


	46. In Which The Meaning of Friendship is Learned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few reunions, a few broken promises, and a very urgent mission in Whiterun being set aside for personal reasons.

A favor for a favor. Normally, Zeno would just beat the information out of someone, but this was a special case. This was a rare case.

This was a _friend_ , and Zeno was still learning how those sorts of relationships worked. And if it meant that they both got their due, and both parties went their separate ways amiably, that meant it was a successful friendship, right? That meant that he was being a friend? It would mean that he kept a valuable ally -- it also meant that he was getting further into his Little Sister’s head. She had all sorts of friends, and she loved them all, and it was something that Zeno couldn’t quite wrap his head around. But he wanted to understand, for her sake.

He wanted to know how she felt. He wanted to have something in common with her when he finally found her. They had their childhood, their memories, and the most profound, meaningful love that Zeno could imagine. But if they could be on the same page about more, like these relationships and bonds, maybe that could persuade her to trust him a bit more…

The cold, dark corridor was home. The promise of death, the darkness, oh, he could _hear_ the heartbeat of the poor wretch awaiting his death at the end. Without the butcher being any the wiser to the living embodiment of death sneaking right into his shadow, Zeno pressed his front to the Nord’s back, threw one arm over the man’s head to catch his mouth, and slid Mehrunes’ Razor across the bastard’s neck.

The pulse of energy singing from the blade was unnecessary to tell Zeno that the man had died, but it prompted a satisfied smile across his lips none the less.

“That’s what you get for being late to the party, Hogni. Had you some fucking manners, you’d have gotten to die with your friends,” Zeno said to the dying man as he stepped over his body and into the growing pool of blood that spilled from the severed artery in his throat. “Which… apparently is a meaningful thing for some people. Huh.” Is that how Little Sister wanted to die? Ugh, just the thought made Zeno’s skin crawl. He never wanted to think of her dying… He went years without her; he couldn’t bear to think of going the rest of his life with that void unfilled.

No bother knocking. They knew he was coming. He was invited. He was welcomed. They thought they could trust him! No one thought twice about the blood on his hands, or the trail of red dripping from the scabbard on his hip, except Lisbet who joked, “Hope you didn’t spoil your appetite!”

“Oh, not one bit!” Zeno sang, shooting her a wink and disarming smile he’d perfected over the years. “And don’t tempt me. I’ve never had widow before!”

“To eat?” she asked.

“Well, not like _that_.”

He took his place by the top of the table, sat himself on the bench, and smiled at each dinner guest in turn. “Thank you all for coming! It’s so hard to get everyone together, but I’m glad we could all take some time out of our busy lives… Really. Thank you all. It makes it much, much easier when you’re all assembled.”

“Do you have something to say?” Eola asked. She leaned forward over the table, eyes wide, waiting. “Has Namira spoken to you again?”

“Namira? Oh, no. But I do have an announcement, of a sort.” He cleared his throat, but the room was already silent as every dinner guest stared at him intently. “Really, I wish I got here earlier, so I could have just poisoned the food. It would have been way easier. But easy isn’t fun, is it?”

Cannibals though they were, less than half of them were warriors. Even Eola, who knew how to hold a sword and cast some spells, knew she would have a difficult time in taking down the Imperial assassin once he was on his warpath. They shifted in their seats, drew daggers and blades, and prepared to fight for their lives. A few stayed perfectly still, either hoping that he wouldn’t notice them or that he was just joking.

Death jokes were always Zeno’s humor, after all.

The first person to dart for the secret exit stumbled over his feet to see it open for him in anticipation. There, at the bottom of the secret tunnel, was Hogni’s body. He opened his mouth to cry out, and was stopped short by a figure appearing from thin air, an extension of the darkness that took the form of a stab-happy clown.

Three more party-goers stood, but they instead ran for the main door to the barrow. Zeno didn’t move to stop them, and from his spot at the head of the table, he heard them scramble down the hall. He also heard when they ran into the man waiting for them. A crash, a splatter, and then a huge beast of a man armored in black stepped through the door to stand menacingly between the remaining Namira worshippers and any hope of survival.

“I heard from my good friend that there were more and more disappearances in Markarth!” Zeno explained. Not that anyone was listening. They were all just screaming and running and trying to fight now. “I had a clue what might be causing it. A cannibalistic cult that recently got a lot more powerful and a safe hiding place sounded like a good primary suspect. So, I offered to show him where you were holed up. Just a friendly favor. Besides, it serves you right. Feasts? Parties? Secret jokes in private, thinly-veiled references in passing? If you want to live a sin, remember _it’s not a fucking game_. You were all bound to be found out at this rate. Take comfort in the fact that your downfall was at the hands of a _friend_ , yeah?”

A blade sheathed in fire came at his right. Might have stuck him, too, if it hadn’t been glowing. Zeno rolled left, off the bench, and drew his dagger before he came back up to a kneel.

“I will feast on you,” Eola spat.

“It’s too bad, really. There was this beautiful spot just south-east of Windhelm I always wanted to take you to. Gorgeous view. Always made me think of you. Old, pretty little shrine.” The blade came in once again, and the fire of her magic extended past the reach of the sword so that Zeno had to duck almost flat to avoid its burn. “Such a shame!”

“Glory to Namira!” she screeched, having none of his taunts.

Zeno had a dozen witty replies, but more than that, he had a blade aching to be made wet with blood once more.

A crackle of lightning lit her hands and flashed his way. His heart palpitated, his skin sizzled, his vision went white, but he never stopped moving. He fought through the sting and propelled himself forward on shaking legs, dagger leading the way in a forward lunge. Her sword flicked upward and out to the right, sending the dagger far off course and leaving her with her left hand alone to offer magical defense.

Well, if she had seen Zeno’s other hand reach for the second dagger on his belt, she would have had her left hand free. Instead, she had a left hand on the stone floor..

“Auughh!!” She shrieked and fell back, panic rising in her one good eye.

“Funny thing about not being able to see on both sides,” Zeno said. “You tend to miss important details. Now--” Both daggers flipped in his hands into a reverse grip, and he plunged them both downward into either of her trapezius muscles into they hit each other at the top of her chest. “--let’s see how my _friends_ are faring.”

He expected something. He didn’t know what he expected, but he knew that he would be met with _something_ when he looked up.

And there it was. That something.

The mighty warrior spun his axe in an arc of unstoppable destruction, cleaving through the bodies of those who thought they might stand a chance. When one man sprung back to avoid the blow, he was caught from behind and flung to the ground by Cicero. The jester followed through by straddling the poor son of a bitch and proceeding to stab… and stab, and stab, and stab, until a calm gauntleted hand on his shoulder came down and gave him a little shake, as though to wake him from a restless sleep.

The two old companions shared a look, though Zeno could not see through the ebony helmet to know just what expression the burly Nord was making, but he imagined that it was a reciprocation of Cicero’s own contented smirk.

“Oh, get a fucking room, you two!” Zeno scolded even as he shoved Namira’s Ring into Eola’s dead eye with a _squish_.

With a tug on his ebony helm, the Nord barked a laugh and shook out his tawny hair. “What? Jealous?”

“Always! You know me, Olev, I just can’t get enough of you!” Zeno pranced around the table and smacked Cicero’s shoulder. “And, there you have it! Markarth is a little safer. You can rest easy knowing your little brats won’t get eaten any time soon. Well, not by _people_ , at least…”

“Yeah, yeah. You did your part, so, as promised…” Olev’s scarred face twisted into the slightest of frowns, and he reached into a pouch hanging from his axe’s harness and produced a crumpled paper.

“Fuck, if I’d known you had it on you this whole time, I would have just lifted it off you when you weren’t looking!” Zeno complained jokingly. But for all his humor, he couldn’t bring himself to show his mirth. Not with his hands shaking as he took the letter from Olev. Not when his throat was getting tight.

The was it. The first he’d heard from his sister in so many years, and it wasn’t even meant for him. If anything _really_ made him jealous, it was this. The paper was torn on the side, like it was taken from a journal. The parchment was stained with all manner of things, and burnt on one edge. The paper smelled like alchemical reagents, and instantly transported the Dragonborn to Mother’s little alchemy table back home.

_Olev-_

_How have you been? I’m sorry I haven’t written to you. Every time I’ve tried, it felt too much like what I would normally write in this journal, and it got too hard. But I thought you should know, I’m safe now. I followed your advice, and I didn’t go back to Tamriel. I’m in Riften now, back with my old friends. They took me back in. Mercer’s dead. They’re taking care of me. It’s not the same as when it was us three, but they care in their way. You’ll probably be pleased to know that I haven’t been drinking. Much. Barely at all. It’s been much better._

_Life has been mostly good, but it’s definitely dangerous. I’m taking part in a lot of jobs, and even though they’re exciting, and I’m glad to be useful, it’s not like before. I miss you and Cicero, and I miss how it felt when it was the three of us. The guild’s great, and being reunited with Thrynn is wonderful, but I miss having a family. I hope I can see you again sometime. If you’re ever in Riften, go down to the Ratway and ask for me. They know I’m in hiding, but I’ve told them that if it’s you, they can tell you where I am._

_I wish you the best, and I hope the children are doing well, too. I’d like to meet them one day._

“How sweet.” Zeno tucked the letter away in his belt and ran one bloody hand through the short-cropped curls of his hair, leaving behind five lines of red across his scalp.

“I didn’t give it to you to rub our relationship in your face. I gave it to you because you wanted her whereabouts, and I had them,” Olev pointed out. “And I don’t do it lightly. She’s under the impression that something terrible is going to happen if she sees you again, but… She’s sure something bad is going to happen no matter what. I think she might be wrong about hiding from you after all.”

“She thinks that the Thalmor will win,” Zeno spat.

“Win what, exactly? The war?”

Zeno shook his head. “The point is, you’re right. She is wrong. She was fooled into thinking that the Thalmor have a chance, and that’s entirely beside the point. All her being without me accomplishes is putting her in bad company, and leaving her unprotected from Thalmor and whatever else would harm her. We have a destiny, and they would see her not see it through…”

Olev’s scar burned red. “Destiny?”

“And when all this is done, she’s getting the fuck out of that stupid guild. She can stay in Dawnstar, with Cicero. Or with you in Markarth. Or with me. Fuck, I have a house in Riften, if she wants to stay close! We’ll get a kid, or something…”

“You’re losing me fast, Imperial.”

“What? Ugh, no! We’d adopt an orphan or some shit. She’s the only family I’d ever want, anyway. I don’t like the idea of getting married to someone who’d think they’re more important than my Sister, so I’d just, you know, have my Sister and no one else. We’d raise a kid together. The kid won’t know the difference.”

“I don’t know what’s more disturbing,” Olev said, finally turning toward the exit of the shrine, “that you’ve actually thought about this, or that I’m somehow helping this incestuous farce of a family happen.”

“There would be no incest! We’d kidna-- We’d _adopt!_ ”

“You Imperials are fucking strange,” Olev said over his shoulder to Cicero, who laughed heartily and nodded.

~~~~

The kids loved the guests. Two bizarre Imperial men, one with all sorts of weird powers, the other who knew all kinds of interesting tricks and funny jokes, they were an unexpected surprise when Olev returned from his adventure and relieved the haggard Juhan from his babysitting duties.

In their little home, carved into the side of the cliff, Cicero was making a fool of himself by the fire for the youngest ones while the older kids cleared the dinner table and set about their evening chores before bed.

Zeno leaned back in his chair, watching Cicero juggle a few sharp objects he’d found around the room. “Never thought Cicero would actually like children.”

“I doubt he really does,” Olev said. He paused to finish the mead left at the bottom of his bottle. “But he’s a good sport. Knows that if he’s going to dress like it, act like it, and talk like it, he’s got to play the part. Even if he’d rather not.”

“What would he rather be doing?”

“Besides stabbing people?” Olev laughed. “He’d probably rather be going to Riften right now. He hated the guild. As far as I know, he only ran into them once with Brina, and he almost cut the big one into pieces. I know he didn’t want me to tell you where she was… We both promised her, we’d keep her whereabouts secret, _especially_ to you. But… Well, like I said before, I think she was wrong about all that. You’re a lunatic, but I’ve started to think that she’s hiding from the wrong problems. That’s a habit of hers. Always has been. And Cicero is alright with you finding her now because, again, he _hates_ the guild. We both agree that she could actually be much better off, and we _definitely_ agree that Brina doesn’t always know what’s best. And for her best interest, we’re willing to break a promise or two. Maybe more than promises, if the guild puts up a fight…”

“Does that mean you’re coming to Riften with us?” Zeno surprised himself with how excited the prospect made him.

Olev shook his head, scanning the room and all of his younger siblings in it. “I can’t just leave… I’ve got a family that needs me.”

“Sure you can!” But the stern scowl that Olev sent his way at that sent an unfamiliar wave of guilt down Zeno’s spine. “Alright, I get it, you don’t want to hear that from _me_ , of all people. And for the record, I didn’t _know_ that I was leaving my parents to die and my sister to fend for herse-- Not making my case, am I? Ugh. Well.”

“Just shut up, Dragonborn. No, I can’t leave. I’m tempted, especially since I’m probably the only person alive that the guild would trust enough to hand her over to. And that’s only because she’s told them explicitly to do so. But for you…” The big Nord shook his head just to imagine the scene. “Good luck. I hope you have a plan, because I doubt you’ll be able to just walk right in and ask politely for them to hand your sister over.”

Chuckling into his hand, Zeno cast Olev a mischievous sidelong glance through thick black lashes. “I have a plan.”

“That smirk makes me think it’s the kind of plan that’d get you killed.”

“Oh, I’d love for them to try!”

Olev chortled helplessly. “Yeah. I guess that’s your style, isn’t it? Damn, but if Brina could see us now. She’d be horrified. And, really, if anyone told me that we’d be friends, I’d have punched them in the mouth.”

“That sort of inflexible thinking is what causes most the world’s problems,” Zeno said sagely.

“You going to stay here tonight? It’s getting a bit late for travel.”

Zeno shrugged. “I’ve got a girl in town that I might stay with.”

Imagining the bloodthirsty Imperial just waltzing into some poor woman’s house made Olev shift in his chair. He opened his mouth to suggest, a bit more forcefully, that he stay where he could keep an eye on him.

“Oh, get off your fucking high horse. I’m handsome, aren’t I? And I can be charming when I want to be. Fact is, I’ve got a girl in every town, and most of them are exceedingly fond of me. This one, I’ll have you know, is rather receptive to me even at my darkest. She’s one of a handful who know exactly who I am.”

First glancing to be sure that none of the children were close enough to pick up on anything particularly scarring that might come up in the coming conversation, Olev lowered his voice and asked, “So, what, when you’re not chasing your sister, you’re just chasing women in general?”

He barked a laugh. “I chase a lot of things! Dragons, contracts, the promise of a good brew of ale. I’m always chasing. But women? I don’t chase them. They come to me… generally.”

“Generally?”

Zeno leaned in toward the table and set his elbows on the cracked wooden surface. Cleared of plates and mugs and saucers and bowls, it was an old, stained hunk of tree that might have been generations old. he traced the rings with an idle finger. “In Windhelm. Altmer woman. Smart as they come. She met me through the Thieves Guild. Then, because I kept coming back, and dropping clues every time whether I meant to or not, she eventually picked up that I was affiliated with worse things. So, since she already knew, I went ahead and just started showing up in my shrouded armor! She’s… afraid. But not because she thinks I’ll hurt her. I’ve threatened her for a hundred reasons, and she responds to it, but I think deep down she knows.”

Olev, at first unable to form words, caught between genuine curiosity and calling Zeno out on a shitty joke, asked, “So, you’re in love with her?”

“What? Love? Oh, Nines, no. I’ll admit, I’m fond of her. I trust her. I killed her cat.” What that had to do with anything, Olev wasn’t sure, but he couldn’t bring himself to interrupt. “By accident. But still. No, it’s just thought. I have friends. Huh.”

“You’ve got a friend in every city,” Olev pointed out.

Mystified, Zeno leaned back once more in his chair, eyes straying to Cicero, who now had the children sitting around him for a story. Those who’d been busy cleaning up or finishing chores wandered closer, some shirking their duties altogether to join the circle or their siblings.

“When all this is over,” Zeno said suddenly, after a considerable pause, “I was thinking about getting in that civil war. See what all the fuss is about. Everyone’s been telling me that I should pick a side…”

“Great. Because that’s what this province needs. You, in politics.” Olev rolled his eyes. “I’d rather you didn’t. Eha is a commander, and I’d hate for her to have to face you--”

“No, I’d be joining the Stormcloaks.”

And there it was again, that speechlessness that the Dragonborn could inflict with such ease! “Stormcloaks? You’re as Imperial as a man can get!”

“And yet, every time I imagine how far the Imperials could go with me on their side, and I think about sacking Windhelm, all I can imagine is Niranye’s house on fire… No. I think I’d rather conquer Solitude. It just _sounds_ more satisfying, doesn’t it?”

Olev’s scarred and marred face twisted. His brows knit, and while his lips tried to smile, something held him back. “It does. Sounds _damn_ satisfying. Hard to imagine you and your sister being Stormcloaks, though.”

~~~~~

They knew he was coming. Before he even opened the door into the Ragged Flagon, he heard Vipir shouting, “Get Bryn and the others! We’ve got a problem!”

Zeno practically answered to ‘Problem’ by now, and he rather took it as a compliment. It meant he had power to stir things up. He made an impact, he caused waves. He was important.

Something-something-something, not welcome here, get out before I gut you like a fish, blah-blah-blah. Dirge would need some new material one of these days. Zeno ignored him and went straight to the bar, sitting himself with a charming smile in front of Vekel. “Good to see you, friend!”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve coming down here,” was the Nord’s hissed response. Contempt in his scheming eyes turned Zeno’s stomach to fire -- who did this piece of shit think he was, exactly, to pass judgment on the fucking Listener, the Dragonborn? Was Zeno on good terms with the Guild? No, not at all, but it’d do them good to remember who they were dealing with.

“And _you’ve_ got a lot of nerve not putting a flagon of mead in front of me and keeping your damn mouth shut,” Zeno reminded him, his smile still forcefully plastered on his face. “So much for friendly neighborhood barkeep--”

“Last person to make trouble for Vekel ended up in the canal,” Dirge rumbled.

“Oh, for the love of… Now I’m being interrupted! Have you learned _nothing_ since last time? Maybe a few things about how important it is _not_ to fuck with me? How it gets bloody and messy when you piss me off?” He’d almost reached for his sword when the distant creaking of a door turned Zeno’s smile genuine. “Ah, but would that be my dear Brynjolf and the other Daedra-dick-suckers? Here I was, thinking you’d keep me waiting all night!”

They emerged from the little corridor to the cistern all together. Vex, in the back, nearly stepped on Delvin’s heels for the chance to get at Zeno all the quicker.

Brynjolf caught her by the elbow, his hazel eyes taking Zeno in with a cautious narrow of his gaze. He was dressed in his black Nightingale leathers, as was Vex. No wonder no one was here to greet him; they’d all been mighty busy, from the looks of it. “I thought we came to a clear understanding last time, Zeno,” Brynjolf said. Oh, he was a master of tone, this one! Smooth and gentle and nonthreatening, like a stern father, commanding respect even from those outside his sphere of influence!

“Oh, we did! But I’m not here to rejoin the Guild, or ask forgiveness, or anything like that! I’m here on business! Strictly business. I have a job for you.”

“A job?” Delvin repeated darkly. “Not sure we want to be taking any tasks too low even for you.”

Until now, everyone else in the Flagon had been keeping their distance, glaring from afar. Zeno waved his arms from their attention and hopped atop his stool. He wanted every rogue and rapscallion in Riften to hear. “I’m commissioning a job from you sorry louts. Sorry, did being kicked out of your little Daedric cult mean I can’t do legitimate business with you, too? Well, my coin is as good as anyone’s, and I happen to have a lot more of it than your average black market dealer. And I mean _a lot_.”

“I doubt there’s anything we could get that you couldn’t steal yourself,” Delvin pointed out.

“Actually, you’d be amazed at the trouble I’ve been having. I’ve been sending fucking _assassins_ , and not even people who hunt _people_ for a living have seen hide nor hair of her!”

“You’re not asking us to…?” Brynjolf asked, horror seeping into his words like ice beginning to sink at the edges of a pond. His grip on Vex loosened just slightly as he reconsidered just how much it was worth to let Zeno come out of the Ratway alive.

“My sister. I have… Oh, I dunno.” He paused to fumble with a bag on his belt, and as he released the purse, he overturned it haphazardly. From up on the stool, everyone got a very good look at the glittering, gleaming gemstones, coins, and other small pieces of treasure that clattered loudly on the floor and carelessly rolled in all directions. “This is probably a few thousand Septims worth in gold, jewels, and a few other little baubles. Odds and ends. This is incentive. And for her safe delivery to me, one hundred thousand Septims more. I’m sure the Guild could use that kind of coin.”

“We don’t do kidnapping. And as far as we’re concerned, she’s still a member of the guild,” Brynjolf answered sternly. His voice was tight, not from temptation, but from thinly-veiled rage. Not very much hit such a sore spot on Brynjolf, that was for sure. On either side of him, Vex and Delvin turned stiff, like cats ready to pounce.

“Hundred thousand’s a lot of money, though,” Dirge confessed, aside.

“Is it?” Vex snapped. “Because most of us have bounties in other holds. Are we going to start collecting bounties on each other, too? This is a fine line, and we’re not crossing it. Fuck off, Zeno.”

“I just know, she can’t have simply disappeared,” Big Brother said breezily. Sister would have recognized the smug smile of his face, the twist of his lips when he did something wrong but he knew Mother and Father wouldn’t actually punish him. When he knew he might even get them on his side by the end of the conversation. “And if you guys aren’t willing to help me as a guild, well, I’m sure there’s one or two of you here who can think of a lot of ways to use a hundred thousand Septims all to themselves. You’re not being a bounty hunter—this is a _family reunion_ I’m asking for! I am a nice guy, you know.”

“A hundred thousand Septims to hand her over to you?” Rune asked in amazement.

“Hand her over~? Oh, Rune, you rascal, you make it sound like _you already have her_ ~! That would be ridiculous! Anyway, if anyone does know where she is, and has ever wondered how it feels to live in a motherfucking castle, I’m going to be staying at the Bee and Barb tonight. I won’t tell your boss who told me what. Our little secret. Very professional, and all that shit.”

~~~~ 

Someone would take the bait. Put enough unlawful scoundrels in a room and one of them is bound to value money more than honor. There were probably a few who would team up and drag her up to him together. Sure, he’d have to kill someone to teach them a lesson about selling out his sister, but someone would walk away rich.

That, or the guild would tear itself apart, divided between virtue of solidarity and the almighty virtue of wealth. And in that case, he’d just grab her in the confusion, and leave them to kill each other.

Holes in the plan? Obviously. But Zeno was a master opportunist, and he was confident that he’d be able to take advantage of the situation no matter what the stupid thieves decided to do. They had places to be, afterall, no time to waste. He had business in Whiterun to see to.

The Bee and the Barb was as lively as always. Zeno drank down a tankard more than he probably should have before climbing the stairs to his room. There was a stain of red on the wood beside the bed. Of course an inn in a town run by rogues would see a lot of excitement, and Zeno sorely regretted that he hadn’t been part of whatever apparent mayhem had taken place in this particular room. Maybe settling down in Riften wouldn’t be so bad, he mused, pulling his loose tunic over his head to reveal the second skin of red and black leather hidden beneath. Brina certainly wouldn’t be allowed to partake in the guild activities, and he’d have to kill Thrynn, but at least this city had charm that he would miss anywhere else.

He’d just fallen back onto the bed when a stern knock echoed in the small room.

“Yes~? Oh, do come in!” He probably sounded like Cicero. The old fool was rubbing off on him more and more with every passing day, not that Zeno needed any help in being eccentric. Right now, the jester was prowling the streets, ready to whisk his sweet Little Sister away if he happened upon her. Maybe he was having better luck with his approach.

The door swung open guiltily. He could _feel_ the shame from the hallway, before the slender figure of a Dunmer stepped inside. He every motion was slow, like each step came with an internal struggle which turned her limbs to ice.

“Well?”

“You have come at an… inopportune time, _protege_.” The bitterness on the word made even Zeno blink back a look of surprise. Yes, Karliah really was as perturbed as she looked. “Under any other circumstances, we’d be united in telling you to leave, and to never show your face again.”

“So what circumstances change your mind, exactly? My sister not working out for you?” Maybe she just wasn’t cut out for it. Maybe she’d gotten injured, and was a liability to them now. Or maybe her being there was too much a threat. No matter what, every option made Zeno’s heart beat a little faster.

Karliah shook her head and sank down to sit on the rickety desk in the corner of the room. It creaked under her slight weight, rotten wooden legs bowing at the unfamiliar sensation of use. “It just so happens that… we want to know where she is, as well. She and a few of my agents left for Falkreath Hold weeks ago. We knew that weather could delay them, but even our most generous estimates cannot account for how long its been. And yet, there has been no word from any hold for us to bail or break them out of any jail.”

“You mean… she’s missing?” Zeno choked.

The Nightingale nodded somberly. “She, and both my other Bal Molagmer. We know she fears you. She has gone to great lengths to protect herself from you. But it is her life and the lives of her comrades that hang in the balance. And, madman though you are, you are more likely than anyone to find them, and for all your flaws, I do not suspect that you wish to harm Brina. All we ask in return is that my agents are returned, as healthy and living as you find them.”

“Your agents? You can keep your agents. But I’m keeping my Sister.”

Her fingertips clutched the edge of the desk, her grey skin probably turning white at the knuckles. Was she imagining her hands wrapped around his throat, or gripping her bow? Zeno figured they were both equally likely, considering the acidity in her lavender eyes and the snarl just barely curling the top of her delicate rosebud lips. “We can… arrange something when you’ve recovered our lost guildmates.” She made a face like she had to swallow bile to say the words. “If I get both of the others back, alive and well, we might… consider it.”

“Good enough for me,” Zeno said through a growing smirk. “Where should I start looking?”


	47. In Which She Attempts Surgery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After much theorizing and thinking about it, the time has come to Brina to finally try to fix that leg of hers. If only all her problems could be fixed like this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not sure if this is an appropriate place to put this, but I've recently started a [Tumblr](http://aliceliveson.tumblr.com/), and I'm considering taking prompt requests/posting drabble/posting spoilery goodness. If you'd be interested, take a look.

This was awful. Truly a nightmare. I never thought I would so dread a strong pair of arms around my middle as a big Nord smothered me with kisses. But my blood ran a little colder with every passing second. Winter air and the lingering chill of the dragon left dead outside Riverwood had nothing on the growing sense of shame and worry in turning my insides to ice.

“Farkas, you should know…” I started, though my voice came out strangled by shame.

“Hm?” The light in his eyes was almost blinding. So much hope. So much (dare I even think the word?) _love_.

I was a monster.

“I’m…” I had to swallow back the lump in my throat before letting all the words rush forth at once. Which admittedly wasn’t hard, since he was holding me a foot off the ground in a bear-hug. “I’m seeing someone. Someone else.”

“Wh…” Crestfallen was an understatement. My resolve began to crumble as his eyes searched me for some clue that I might be joking. His grip loosened, and I feared for my delicate leg should he drop me. “I…”

There. Nice and easy and simple. It wasn’t like some over-dramatic, hackneyed romance novel. Just two adults, having a straight-forward, mature conversation--

A fist appeared from my peripheral. Bless Farkas, he didn’t drop me, even with the full impact of Thrynn’s punch against his cheekbone.

So much for mature conversation.

“Your nose healed nicely,” Thrynn hissed sardonically.

“So did your jaw,” Farkas answered, not quite able to match the venom Thrynn had, but pissed none the less. When he set me down, it was less gentle than he might have done, but more gently than I remember him tossing me onto his bed, so I couldn’t quite tell how much of his ire was for me.

I took one step to try to put myself between them, to continue being the adult, using my words when the two men were more than ready to resort to fisticuffs, but I couldn’t make it. Instantly, my left leg buckled underneath my weight, and I was down with an inward gasp of pain. “Could this -- could this _please_ wait?!” Scorned lovers ought to have been the least of my worries when my leg was in dire need of amputation. Would I ever be able to walk on it again? If I, the Spirit of the Rift and darn-good healer couldn’t get it to work, could there be any hope? Some wounds, some illnesses, are just too far out of our hands to help; I tried to remind myself of that, and, unsurprisingly, the sentiment did nothing to comfort my fast-fraying nerves.

“Brina!” I don’t know which low, growling voice said it, because right then, two big, strong Nord men came rushing over.

Huh. Odd time to realize that I did, in fact, have a ‘type.’ Between the two of them looming over me, the grey sky was completely eclipsed behind their combined muscular girth.

“Thrynn, get your pack,” I whimpered. “Rope… for a tourniquet. Farkas, you aren’t shy about blood, and you’ll be strong enough to--”

“No,” Thrynn interrupted. “You can heal this. Don’t do anything rash.”

“Or we can take you to Whiterun!” Farkas eagerly offered, apparently setting aside his own hurt feelings for now, though I didn’t think for a moment that the matter was behind us yet. “Danica can help. Maybe between the two of you--”

“I have more bone just sitting in the muscle than I have connecting my knee to my ankle! The fact that it’s lasted this long is nothing short of a miracle. Now get a tourniquet!” I had to take action. There was no more ignoring the pain, no more hoping it would get better over time. It wouldn’t wait any longer.

“No! You’ve been talking about healing your leg forever now, saying if you cut your leg open, you might be able to fix it from the inside.” I knew Thrynn had no idea what the actual process would include, and that he was only repeating what I’d told him before. He also didn’t realize just how lofty that proposed surgery was. Sure, I talked about it, I’d theorized, but I never once attempted it, or anything like it.

To my surprise, I didn’t have to be the one to shoot the suggestion down. Kynvind ran to the congregation from behind Thrynn, hissing before she’d even arrived, “We don’t have time for that! We have years’ worth of wages for those dockworkers in goods, and we need to get it to the people who deserve it. I’ve been alright with taking it slow for her sake, but can we let people _starve_ while we wait around in Whiterun for her to heal from something like that?! It’s irresponsible!”

“Then leave her to us,” Aela cut in sharply. She and Ria asked for no permission to take me from under either arm and lift me between them. “We will take her to Whiterun, to Danica, and they can do whatever witchcraft they need. She’ll recover with us, and you can take her back whenever you decide it’s convenient.” If Farkas couldn’t express contempt as well as others, Aela more than made up for it. Companions were not the ones to leave their brothers or sisters behind.

Any moment, steam would start coming out Thrynn’s ears like a Dwarven contraption. “Over my dead body.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Aela threatened.

He really did need to stop saying that to people who would take him up on it  
.  
By now, townsfolk were starting to wander out of the city to inspect the dragon. Were I not doubled over in pain, held up by two warrior women, I might have appreciated the sobering reality check. A dragon died here. The World Eater’s pieces were dominating the board, and we, mere pawns in the greater game, took it down. And yet here we were, in the shadow of its corpse, bickering over... me.

Since when was I the one people cared about? Enough to ignore the big dead eyes still glaring at us even in death? Or, at the least, shouldn’t we have been focusing on any number of important questions, like if the village was safe, or how much damage Riverwood's walls took? Wasn’t the spotlight where my Brother belonged? He was always the center of attention, not me. It felt rather ridiculous, the more I thought about it.

But then I thought about how much I hurt again, and all that perspective was lost to the concentration it took not to start sobbing.

“She’s right,” Kynvind said. Her cerulean eyes pinched shut. “We don’t have time. People are _counting_ on us.”

Aela bristled beside me.

“Then they’re counting on the wrong people,” Thrynn argued. “She needs help, and I’m not leaving her.”

“It’s alright, Thrynn,” I said through clenched teeth. I didn’t want to be without him. I didn’t want to be separated from him ever again. But Kynvind would go all the way back to Riften by herself if she had to, and we both knew it. “Stay with her. I’ll be home as soon as I’m better.” One leg or two, whichever it had to be.

But he wouldn’t budge. His warm eyes narrowed, and his feet planted themselves stubbornly. Even his stance widened, like he expected to be pulled away.  
“I mean it, Thrynn. I’ll be okay. The Companions will protect me--”

“Oh, is that what they’ll do?” he snapped, and he glared daggers in Farkas’s direction.

And Farkas, still fuming, snorted derisively. “No more than that, I can promise you.”

“What?” Thrynn was puffing up like an angry crow by now. And, in an all-frustrating turn of his macho pride, he shouted, “Is she not good enough for you now?!”

Oh, for the love of all the Divines. I swear, at least three of the Aedra and Daedra I’d angered must be gathered around, watching this and _laughing_.

“Thrynn, for fuck’s sake!” Kynvind cried, and she came up behind him to grab his arm and pull it back before he could go in for another swing. “You win! See, he’s not going to touch her, we can go, and she’ll be taken care of!”

“I’m not going to leave her with a man who’s going to touch her, just like I won’t leave her with a man who looks down on her! What, you think you’re too good for her, since she’s a thief? Or is it me? Is she only as good as the men she’s fucked? And to think she _wants_ to go with you…!”

My face couldn’t get any hotter, somewhere between embarrassment and anger which was rising to a boil. “Would you listen to yourself?” I knew Thrynn had a temper. He got violent when he was upset; when women were involved, that reaction only got stronger. But of all the people for him to lash out at, Farkas was not a good one. Granted, he usually would have pulled his sword out by now, so I suppose he must have been restraining himself at least a little bit. I tried to give him that as I growled, “You can be as upset as you want -- at _me_ \-- when I get back home. But I _need_ to go to Whiterun. If no one’s going to let me amputate it, then I need Danica. I need Arcadia. And I need you to shut up and let me go before I use what little energy I have left to throw imp stool dust in your face.”

The last time I’d seen him so angry, he’d just stabbed a guard in the back for trying to kill me. He gave Farkas a long glare, and when he finally turned to leave, made sure to slam hard into Farkas’s unyielding shoulder. Something was hissed under his breath, a threat or an insult, and both he and Kynvind were hurrying back into the town, past the growing crowd of curious townsfolk.

Kyn cast me a worried glance, and was gone with Thrynn back into the throng.

It wasn’t until he’d disappeared that a cold realization hit me. He was _livid_ , and when I got back to Riften, he might not be waiting for me. Sure, I’d still be in the guild, and I couldn’t imagine Brynjolf kicking me out for seeing to my injury, but Thrynn might not get over this easily. He might not get over it at all.

I left him behind to go with my former lover in my time of need. He was pissed, and justifiably. I could only hope that, after his pride and temper cooled, he’d be willing to talk.

The Companions weren’t ones to dawdle around. Farkas took his greatsword to one of the horns, severing it from the head as a trophy or proof of our success, and we were off.

“Aren’t you tired? Shouldn’t you rest?” I asked, still being carried between the two women.  
Aela shook her head. “We’re fine, Spirit. Our job now is to get home quickly.”

I tried to carry my own weight as best as I could on my one good leg, but I was only slowing down Aela and Ria with my one-legged leaps. After fumbling along between them for a few miles, they passed me off to Farka, who let me collapse against his back. He didn’t say anything to me. All in all, I was lucky that he would want to help me at all, immediately after I completely broke his heart and my former-turned-new-again lover punched him in the face. It just went to show how good of a person Farkas was when it came down to it, and maybe Thrynn hit the nail on the head after all: Farkas really was too good for me. It probably made it easier for him to get over me.

We rested only after many hours of travel. The Companions, being hardy warriors, could just toss furs onto the side of the road, curl up for a couple hours, and then get back up like they’d never slept better. So right at the bottom of the foothills of Falkreath Hold where the forest met the tundra of Whiterun Hold, they built a small campfire and set out their furs for the night. They passed around rations, and, despite my own troubles, I took the time to heal any cuts, bruises, or minor injuries they’d sustained during the fight that I’d yet to see to. I was glancing between Ria and Aela awkwardly, wondering if either would let me sleep on their fur with them, when Farkas pulled me across the mossy forest floor and onto his bed.

“Umm, Farkas, you don’t--”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing.” It really was. Despite my better judgment, I was so tired and in so much pain that I relented and fell against the soft bedding, and when Farkas got comfortable beside me, there was no sense of anything more. No romance, no indication that he was going to try to win me back. I imagine this might be how it would feel if he shared a bed with Aela. Just a Companion, nothing more.

Good for him. It was better this way.

My feet didn’t leave the ground the whole next day of travel, except when I was put down for a rest. If anything, I got the impression that they were fighting over who got to carry me, like I was some rare, unexpected opportunity to train. It’s not often they have reason to carry a person on their back for long distances.

“So, they found you,” Aela said offhandedly.

“Uh… yes.”

“Arvid was the one who gave them your journal. He thought it was best for you not to be alone.”

“I… appreciate that. He’s right. I can get into trouble when left to my own devices.”

Aela, however, didn’t seem impressed. “I know you weren’t happy in Jorrvaskr, but there are a lot of people who’d be better at taking care of you than the Thieves.”

“Maybe I don’t need to be taken care of,” I pointed out, a little put off. I put my chin on Farkas’s shoulder. “I just need people to steer me away from cliffs, that’s all. Not to be babysat.”

Both the women chortled. “Funny. That sounds like what a Companion would say,” Ria said.

Were they trying to convince me to stay? I was a healer and an alchemist, not a warrior. But, with Arvid as Harbinger, I thought, maybe the general atmosphere of Jorrvaskr had changed. Arvid wouldn’t stand for anyone talking down to me. He wouldn’t stand for any disrespect. Maybe I hadn’t been able to see that boat as a home because Arvid hadn’t been there during my stay.

I shook off the fantasies and daydreams of the possibilities. My home was Riften, if I had one at all. I had Riften!

I had… the sewers. A Daedra breathing down my neck, itching to steal my soul. The constant siren’s call of the mead and ale that flowed like water in the Flagon.

Okay, maybe Riften wasn’t an _ideal_ home, but did I deserve better? Certainly not. Not with the way I could turn my back on people and break hearts. I was almost as bad as my brother. And I’d been able to justify it by saying that the world was about to end, and I may as well spend my last days with people who loved me.

But now, the world wasn’t ending, and I wasn’t sure whether or not Thrynn would be ready to forgive me when I returned. Did my logic still hold water?

There was nothing I could do now. I’d just have to see what awaited me when I got there, I decided, and I steeled my heart for the time in between.

Whiterun. Beautiful Whiterun. Miles away, from the top of the last hill before we were officially in Whiterun Hold, we got an amazing view of the sprawling tundra, turned frosty and white by the cold. The city looked like a child's model, but I could swear that even from here, I could see the vibrant pink blossoms of the eternally-blooming Gildergreen. This place had been a home to me. Living with Anoriath and Elrindir, working with Arcadia, flirting with Arvid in his Whiterun guard’s yellow tabard, dancing with Farkas under the bright pink buds of the sacred tree; that had been home. It had been perfect. And since then, I’d gotten close. I’d felt fleeting moments of that sense of belonging. The warmth of waking up between Olev and Cicero in our one, tiny tent, or passing insults from one side of the New Gnisis Cornerclub to the other, that had gotten close. Sitting on Thrynn’s lap and trying to keep up on a hand of cards in the Flagon had gotten close. And maybe I was just making my time in Whiterun out to be better than it was; after all, the whole time, I’d still been living in relative poverty, and constantly distracted by the whereabouts of my brother.

Did I ever really have a home? Was that all just wishful thinking? And could I ever have one, or would one thing or another drive me away?

Was I just destined to wander?

_Was this how Brother felt?_

Once again, I singlehandedly made a journey take twice as long as it had to be. Even though they carried me, I often needed to stop to drink a potion to help with the pain, or to rub the sore flesh. They were patient, or more patient than I necessarily expected. They stopped for me by the bridge that headed toward Eastmarch, and I ran my hand idly over bunches of dormant lavender shrubs while I waited for my potion to kick in.

Farkas knelt beside me. I knew it was going to be a horribly uncomfortable conversation, but he deserved to know how I felt, and an apology. The moment he saw me open my mouth, he stood up and walked away.

Huh. It would have been nice to just know where he stood with me, but any time I tried to start a conversation, he closed himself off immediately. Maybe that was just how he dealt with finding out the girl he’d been faithful to and waiting for hadn’t been invested in him in the first place.

Could I have fallen in love with Farkas? Easily, and a voice in the back of my head worried what I would do if I started having feelings for him while I stayed in Whiterun without Thrynn. Did that make this any easier? Of course not, and I knew it wouldn’t make things better for Farkas to know that, either.

Without saying anything, he helped me onto his back for the last bit of the journey. We’d have come all the way from Riverwood to Whiterun without a single meaningful word exchanged.

Unlike the last few times I came into town, this time I wasn’t hidden in a cloak. This time, I was in my tight-fitting Guild leathers, my face concealed by a hood, shrouded in darkness. I was as mysterious as the Spirit of the Rift was supposed to be, but not nearly as majestic as I came in riding a Companion rather than any sort of noble, otherworldly steed. He took me up to the Wind District for the Temple of Kyne while Ria and Aela split off, one to inform Arvid of my arrival and the other to get my surrogate mother Arcadia. If we were really going to try to open my leg up and heal it from the inside, we’d need all the help we could get.

Among the sick and injured, I was taken inside the living, breathing temple just as the sun was setting through the high windows. The room was burning orange in the cloudless winter dusk, capturing what remained of the light of way within its bright walls and reflecting it in the small, shallow pool in the center of the temple. At the center of the pool, the colorful mosaic depicting a bird seemed to glitter so that, when viewed from just the right angle, its wings appeared to be flapping every so slightly.

All eyes turned to the large Companion who stomped in and slammed the door behind him, then to the black-clad waif that slid from his shoulders. Acolyte Jenssen glanced up while cleaning off some bloody rags in the central pool, and for a moment I was distracted watching the red dissolve away in the consecrated water, leaving not a drop of impurity behind.

“Ah. Farkas, is it? Is this one of your recruits?” Danica began amiably enough, moving from a nearby patient to inspect me. Her hands pulled back my hood.

I wonder if I was a sort of ghost from the past to them. If they ever expected to see me again, or if they had forgotten about me entirely, just a vague shadow from a distant, disregarded memory.

Spirit, indeed.

Her eyes widened, but she didn’t look surprised. And, for a moment, I swore she was wincing to realize just who had been brought to her.

“What happened?” she asked. Not, ‘Where have you been?’ or, ‘What are you wearing?’ or anything else one might expect of a person who’d been gone from the city for months without a trace. I wanted to think she was just being focused on the more important matter at hand, but there didn’t even seem to be a question in her eyes besides that one.

“My leg. Remember how it was never going to get perfectly better?” I said. “Well, it’s gotten worse. I think I know how to avoid cutting it off, but I need your help. Arcadia’s also coming. It’s going to be bloody and messy, but I think…”

“I won’t do anything to endanger your life,” she interrupted, uncommonly concerned. Yet she still took me by the arm and helped me to a cot, lowering me down. I wasn’t wearing one of my usual dresses, so she had to untie and remove my boots and force my pants down my skinny legs.

Farkas didn’t offer any privacy. I swear, his blue eyes might have been glowing over Danica’’s shoulders.

After being in tremendous pain for too long over the leg, I was hardly patient with her answer. “My life will be in danger if it’s amputated, too! There’s no safe way to deal with this anymore!” It would sound crazy. But I didn’t have a choice. “I want to try surgery. I don’t know that I could do it on my own, not with the pain. But with help, I think it could work. I want to open my leg, dig the bone out of the muscle, at least as much as we can, and try to piece my leg back together. And heal it all into place.”

And Danica just looked at me like I was already delirious from the pain. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I went to the mage’s college to study restoration! I talked to the Face Sculptor in Riften to know how she would go about it! I know, its risky, and a huge undertaking, but if it doesn’t work, we’ll just cut it off! No more loss than we already expected.”

Once my leathers were off and I was exposed to the cold air, Danica drew in a breath to see just what a state my leg was in. Black and blue from the knee down, it looked at least as bad as it felt.

“Just, as soon as Arcadia gets here, we need to cut off blood flow. Then we use a knife, cut through in rows to sift through the muscle for bone, and push the shards back to where the bone should be. Somnalius and lady’s smock can also help slow bleeding. Farkas, go tell Arcadia to bring Somnalius and lady’s smock!”

Right as the words left my mouth, a comfortingly cool hand touched my shoulder. Arcadia leaned over my lying body, a worried smile on her lined face. “I have an ingestible powder made of juniper and barnacles, it’ll work just as well.”

“The seeds--”

“Are removed.”

We shared a smile. Mara, I missed having an alchemist friend who knew what I was talking about!

“You can’t be serious!” Danica protested.

“Of course I’m serious. I’d do it by myself if I didn’t think I might lose consciousness when the blood loss hits me.”

Something about Danica looked frightened. Scared, and not just for my sake. But when it was clear that I wouldn’t back down, and that I had Arcadia and at least one Companion on my side, she begrudgingly rolled up her sleeves and swallowed down any further complaints.

Danica located a tourniquet and set it around my leg. No going back. I would end this with a fixed bone, or with nothing. I glanced up at Farkas, and hoped I didn’t look nervous. “You don’t have to watch this.” The surgery, _or_ me in my underclothes from the waist down.

“I’d feel better if I stayed with you,” he answered.

“I know I should have--”

“Don’t worry about it. You’ve got other things to focus on. But I’m here if you need me for anything.”

He really was too good for me. As sweet and stupid and perfect as Arvid, and somehow, even more handsome.

“Are you ready?” Arcadia asked me, handing me a wooden spoon full of powder, which I set in my mouth and began to suck on. The mixture would help keep me from bleeding to death, the spoon would give me something to bite on that wasn’t my own tongue.

I nodded, took the dagger from my bandolier, and made the first cut.

I’m not going to pretend, even for a moment, that I knew what I was doing. I had never practice anything remotely like this, I’d only seen how Galathil had done her craft and speculated on how I could recreate the process on myself. I made it about halfway through my leg before the pain, the searing pain like nothing I’d felt before, combined with my ever-growing light-headedness, got the better of me. At first, I thought it was all in my head. The tourniquet should have eliminated most of the feeling in my leg. But the magic that we pumped through it was constantly undermining the effects of the tourniquet, since we were always recovering and rejuvenating the nerves that otherwise would have been too deprived of circulation to function.

It started when my eyesight got patchy with splotches of black. Then, I don’t remember when, everything was black, and I could only vaguely feel myself fall back on the cot and Farkas’s big hands on my shoulder.

His voice rumbled that I was alright. I believed him as I fell through the cot, through the floor, and out of consciousness.

~~~

It had been days. I knew when my eyes opened that I’d been sleeping for a long time. Terrified, I opened my eyes to the midday sun filling the temple. It came in through the windows and painted rainbows across the floor below. I was covered with a blanket, as I’d been almost completely undressed since I was last awake, and left in just my underclothes on top and bottom. Tearing the threadbare blanket away at the same moment as I bolted upright, I was ready to see the worst.

But there it was. My leg. It was swollen and bruised, but recovering. The incisions had been mostly mended, and where the calf wasn’t purple, it was instead a splotchy yellow. My shin was more scab than anything else. I experimentally clenched and unclenched my toes, and felt a relieved laugh escape me when they obeyed.

“Ah, miss would you…?!” The young acolyte, Jenssen, rushed over to me to toss my blanket back over me.

I wasn’t naked, but I suppose living in close quarters in the cistern had considerably altered my concept of modesty. “Sorry. Just wanted to see if I still had two.”

The fledgling priest nodded stiffly. “You should rest, though. Danica will be back shortly to see to you.”

“It’s fine,” I assured him. I wrapped the blanket around myself consciously and turned to put both feet on the ground. “I’m a healer. I can take over myself from here.”

“You’re supposed to stay here…! Patience, please, the body needs time to mend!”

But I already had glowing restorative energy in each of my hands, and I was channeling it through my body even as he argued. “Really, believe me, I’m not good at much, but I’m _very_ good at healing. It’ll just be a minute, and I’ll be walking out of here!”

“You need to stop!” He glanced around, anxious as a hunted rabbit. “He told me to keep you here!”

“Who?” I asked, though my attention was mostly on my leg. The more I focused my healing spell on it, the more weight I could put on it with every second! This was wonderful! Sure, I would still have to be extremely careful for a while, and I might have a lingering limp, but it was mostly well! And the pain would last, that much I could already tell, for a few days or weeks until the healing was completely finished. “Arvid? I’ll go straight to Jorrvaskr, don’t worry.”

He was fussing behind me even as I wobbled up to my feet. It would be a hard walk all the way there, but as long as I was careful, I could do it!

It worked! It actually worked! Maybe, in time, I could move as quickly and easily as I used to!  
“No, please, you’re supposed to stay!”

“I’ll come back so Danica knows how it went. Oh, I need to see Arcadia, too! Uh, where are my clothes?”

“He’ll kill me if he knows you left!”

“You vastly overestimate Arvid’s temper. But I _do_ need my clothes. I can’t very well wander around naked everywhere.”

Jenssen nodded nervously. “I suppose… even if you do stay here, which you _should_ , you need to be dressed.” He reached behind the healing altar I’d been laying on and produced my bandolier and small pack.

When I opened it, I expected to see my leathers on top. Instead, a neatly folded outfit of charcoal grey and red awaited me. “How did this get in here?” Ama Nin’s outfit. Curious. My leathers were tucked underneath, but I thought better of it. Was I really in hiding anymore? The world was ending now anyway. Brother had already gone to war with the dragons. I wouldn’t go out of my way to be seen, but the secrecy of wearing my Thieves Guild uniform seemed unnecessary now, especially in sleepy ol’ Whiterun. I tossed the blanket over my head and started to pull on my dress underneath it, mostly for Jenssen’s sake.

I almost forgot how nice this dress looked. I looked civilized in it, and the high waist and voluminous bouse filled my scrawny frame. No longer the Spirit of the Rift, I was Brina once more.

I shed the blanket and was off, reveling in just how fast I could walk without daggers of pain shooting up my shin, toward the door, when Jenssen’s hand took my elbow.

“I _can’t let you leave_ ,” he said, though it was more like begging than demanding. He glanced back to my narrow bed. It was only then that I noticed the wooden pillar beside the altar, the one nearest to where my head had rested, was marred. A deep gash marked the wood, like someone had stabbed through the wood with a very, very sharp dagger.

Jenssen continued, “He said he would kill me if you escaped before he could get back with his boss.”

“Was it a member of the Thieves Guild?” I asked, and I leaned in to inspect the cut curiously. Then, because I didn’t expect the holy man to know what a member of the Guild looked like, I added, “Were they wearing a dark leather, like what I wore when I came in?”

A piece of torn parchment sat crumpled on the floor, wedged between the pillar and the altar. I picked it up and started to unfold it, and only barely started to make sense of the patches of ink --was it a handprint?-- when Jenssen said, “It was a jester.”

I dropped the note like it was on fire, before I even saw what was scrawled in angry scratches beneath the hand, and threw my bandolier and pack over my shoulder.  
“Wait! You need to wait!”

“For the _Listener?!_ ” I squawked. Brynjolf told me that the Guild had talked it out with the Brotherhood, that whatever the Listener thought he had against me had been resolved! And, as much as I knew I loved Cicero, I was also under no illusions that his loyalty was to his order first and foremost. “No! Not waiting! Definitely not waiting!”

I shouldn’t have been running so soon after the procedure, but I didn’t know how long I had. And if the Listener was looking for me, and not in a pleasant mood, I wouldn’t stick around and find out. I shoved the heavy wooden doors to the temple open and ran out like a bat let loose from a long-locked barrow.

And there was Jenssen, easily keeping pace on his long, long Nord legs, reaching out for me again.

I never attacked a priest before, I thought uncomfortably as I shot a jolt of electricity through him. Kyne would have to forgive me -- or, I could just pray to Talos. He was the sort of God who knew that sometimes, we just had to fight. Sure. As soon as I got somewhere safe, I’d square this away with Talos.

Jenssen collapsed at the door. I heard a guard holler from down the avenue, but no way in Oblivion was I going to stop now.

My leg shifted beneath me, unsure what to make of its altered state, but I kept going. No time to test the results of my surgery like the present! And I ran, toward the Gildergreen, toward Jorrvaskr.

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t home, I realized then. The building didn’t matter. Arvid mattered, Farkas mattered, Aela mattered! And damn it, I mattered to them!

Why was the wind District so empty? I ran beneath the arbors, but I’d never been athletic, and so much time spent moving especially slow meant that I was gasping for breath, fatigued before I even got to the stairs leading to Ysgramor’s ship.

I could feel him. Silent as death, invisible as shadow, but I knew he was there, turning the air around us as still and cold as the stagnant air trapped in the abandoned Dawnstar Sanctuary.

I reached out for Jorrvaskr and started to scream, “Farkas!”

The word never made it out.


	48. In Which She Fights The Fallen

I was flailing. He was struggling to control me. I was screaming. He was muffling it with one hand, clamped hard over my mouth. I was trying to worm around, to get an electrified hand on him to blast him off of me. He was dodging me, and responding by twisting my arms with his until I was double over, and both of my wrists were locked behind me with his one free hand.

Thrynn taught me how to get out of a hold, and this one didn’t have much strength behind it. I twisted both of my wrists and pulled against his thumb, and broke myself free easily enough. Of course, I was a fool to think that the Listener of the Dark Brotherhood could be so easily shaken off. As soon as I was free, I overbalanced forward and landed on my hands and knees. And one knee just happened to be bruised and scabbed and generally sensitive from the surgery I’d just woken up from.

As soon as it hit the hard ground, I drew in a sharp inward gasp of pain that was immediately exhaled as a cry of agony.

“Shit! I didn’t mean to hurt you!”

A hand came down on my shoulder and, with a push, flipped me over so that I was sitting on my backside, eyes wide with an adrenaline cocktail made up of fear, pain, and confusion.

There he was. The monster from the Dawnstar Sanctuary. The embodiment of death, darkness given life, clad in jet black and blood red leather. It looked like he’d tried to cover it up with a traveling cloak, but there was no mistaking the shrouded armor that peeked from the folds of grey cotton. His face was concealed completely; if the hood of his cloak weren’t enough to hide him, the Dark Brotherhood cowl he still wore beneath it made his face nothing more than a shadow. The cowl sported a mask that muffled his voice, and made it sound only deeper and more menacing.

I was ready to start screaming in earnest when he dropped to his knees in front of me. Any moment and he would slice a dagger across my throat!

He reached out for me, and I felt myself become paralyzed with fear, just like the first time I’d seen him. What was he doing?!

His hand caught my leg, and I cried out.

“Where are you hurt?”

I -- I was imagining the concern in his voice, right? Surely he meant that he was delighting in my pain, and that this was just the beginning of my slow, cruel death. That was what he meant to say, right?

His hand, wrapped in leather that still looked shiny with someone else’s wet blood, touched my knee gently as a lover. “This is the leg that was hurt, right? Fuck, I’m so sorry. Oh, damn it, I got your dress dirty, too! Hold still a moment. I’ll brush it off for you. There, that’s a little better. Can you stand up? Here, let me help you up. Take my hand.”

_What in Oblivion was going on here?!_ What was he playing at, what sign of weakness was he waiting for? But I knew I couldn’t fight him. He had the oppressive, powerful aura of a dragon, making me feel so very small and helpless in his shadow. He was death. He was unstoppable. And whatever he was planning, I couldn’t stop it.

So, ever-so carefully, I reached out and took his hand.

And he was holding it like a prize, like he’d never let it go, and he pulled me up. As soon as I was standing, he moved in to wrap his arms around me. For several long, tense moments, I stood in his embrace like a twig underfoot, waiting to be snapped.

He released me only to place my hand on his arm and encourage my weight onto him. “Can you stand alright?”

“Y...yes?”

“Great!” He swooped forward, and I flinched. But instead of murdering me, I was shocked to feel the soft cloth of his face mask hit me, and the warmth of his lips beneath it on mine. I could barely process what had happened before he was tugging me along, practically skipping toward the northern side of the Wind District. “This is perfect! I couldn’t have asked for better timing! I was planning on having you kept here until I got back! I didn’t think you’d be awake, let alone so well recovered! Can you imagine my face when I heard Cicero found you, unconscious?! I thought I was going to have a heart attack! Thought I’d have to burn down the whole city if you died.”

Something about this whole thing was terrifying, and with every puzzling word he said, it got worse.

The way he spoke. The cadence, the charming charisma, even with every syllable slightly drowned by his cowl, struck a painfully familiar chord. And, though he walked with the practiced movements of a killer, walking beside him felt disconcertingly natural.

“Where are you taking me?” I stammered. I didn’t know what this was, and not knowing what the Listener could possibly want with me was a whole new kind of fear. Why couldn’t he just kill me quickly? Why care about my knees for my dress? Why help me walk if he only plans to lead me to my final resting place?

“To Dragonsreach. Its time to finally end this! Most of the guards are there, if you’re wondering why it’s so empty around here. They’re going to help! Oh, I’ve got such big plans! You’ll see! The others are keeping everyone in their homes. Trying to avoid unnecessary casualties. You know how things happen when people get curious.”

He didn’t say it like I was about to die. He sounded gleeful. Oh, Divines, what was he going to do to me?!

I squeaked in response. I don’t know what he wanted me to say.

He turned on me once more, and though I couldn’t see his face, I could feel the intensity of his stare. “Are you… are you _crying?_ ”

I was. How could I not? I was about to die. I was frightened and confused and alone and this man was _insane!_ I sniffed and turned my face away.

He stopped walking, grabbed me by the shoulders, and turned me toward him. Was he going to kiss me again?

“Shush. It’s alright. I know, it’s a lot. It’s crazy. But we’re in this together. No matter what, like we were always meant to be. Now, shh, hey, stop crying.” One leather glove wiped my cheek. “Hold your breath.”

_What?_

“Now look up. Look up and count the clouds.”

There were hundreds of little white fluffs scooting across the blue expanse of Oblivion. I couldn’t possibly count them all. But that was the point. I only watched them for a moment, not long enough to kill the tears welling up in my eyes before I looked back at the shadowy face of the Listener. And when I reached out, he didn’t move to stop me, or dodge my hand. He just stood there with all the trust of a childhood friend, and let me pull the cowl from his face.

My heart stopped.

“Sister?” Brother asked. Though my tears surprised him, he was breathless with excitement, with anticipation. “What’s the matter? Hey, come on, you need to stop crying! We’re about to save the world! You have to be ready!”

“B...Big Brother?” I could scarcely say the words.

And, as confused as I was, Brother nodded slowly. “Of course. Who else would I be?” He paused. “Don’t tell me you’d just let any creep on the street grab you! You really thought I was just some stranger?” Another pause, then incredulously, “I kissed you, and you didn’t know who I was?! You should have killed a stranger for that!”

“I couldn’t kill _you_!” The Dragonborn! The Listener!

He conceded the point with a shrug. “Well, you should have _tried_. I can’t believe you didn’t recognize me!”

“You’re wearing a mask! And a hood! And _Dark Brotherhood armor_!”

“Ah! Hey now, don’t say that so loud,” he whispered, glancing around to make sure no one was nearby. No, the streets were still hauntingly empty. “Most people don’t know where this outfit is from. Not a lot of people knowingly rub elbows with us and live to tell about it, you know? Anyway, we need to hurry--”

“Not to mention it’s been years.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“ _Years!_ ”

“I know, and believe me, leaving you behind was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.” Brother’s eyes turned soft, his expression truly remorseful. Gloved hands found mine, and held them gently. “But I’m setting that right. Starting today.”

“You’re in the Dark Brotherhood. You’re--you’re the Listener!”

He ducked his head and winced. “Yeah. We can talk about that later. We’ll have all the time in the world. Right now--”

“No!” I pulled my hands from his. “No, you’re a killer. And you… You know about it, don’t you? What the Thalmor are doing? Why are you trying to stop Alduin if you know that just gives them more time to see their plan through?” He was dooming the world. I exiled myself to save Tamriel from this fate, and here he was, ruining everything.

“Oh, you mean Landfall?” he asked, as if I’d asked him what he had for breakfast. “It’s going to happen eventually. I mean, time is cyclical. The Thalmor literally have an infinite number of chances. If not this time, it could just as easily be the next, or a million chances from now, or a billion, or more.”

“But it could be this time!”

“And I just don’t buy that.” His perfect face split into a smile. Not quite manic, but there was something behind his eyes that raised a fight or flight instinct in me. “They have an infinite number of chances, but they’ve also fucked it up an infinite number of times, too. Even the damn Hist have lost track of how many times they’ve botched it. Yes, they’ll win _eventually_ , but this time? No. Not a chance. I mean, have you _seen_ the people they have in charge? I once saw Ondolemar walk face-first into a door--”

“You’re missing the point!”

Like I was still a child, he disregarded my complaints with a rough shake of his hand in my hair. “So are you. I don’t care what the Thalmor do. If you’re so worried about the Thalmor, when this is done, we’ll go to Windhelm together. We’ll join the Stormcloaks, wipe the Thalmor out of Skyrim, and thwart them at every turn. We’ll reinforce Talos as a Tower for Mundus. _We’ll_ be the ones to make the Thalmor fail. Not Alduin.” His hand moved from my hair to my face, and, caressing my cheek, he purred, “But first, we make Alduin fail. No more dallying. I know, it’s fast, and it’s scary, but they’re waiting for us in Dragonsreach.”

“For us?” As he started to walk up the steps, pulling me along behind him by the hand, I looked up at the castle with wide eyes. It loomed over the city in all its Nordic glory, vertical like a man standing at the top of the city to look down on his subjects. I’d only been in it once, with Arvid, the day I first learned of the world ending.

“Sort of,” he explained, glancing over his shoulder. He kept glancing, like he couldn’t bare to take his eyes off of me even for a full second. “Waiting for me. I was just coming down to check on you before I left, but I didn’t actually think you’d be awake. But yeah, everyone’s taking their places.”

“For what?”

“Oh, you’ll see! I’m so excited for you to see! It’s going to be brilliant!”

I’d been in Dragonsreach. The whole building sat atop of preposterously steep hill and towered over the city and, in fact, the whole surrounding plains. My breath came out in thick white plumes by the time we reached the castle proper, both from the cold and the amount of energy it took to climb the stairs.

Brother, who made it up to the Throat of the World on multiple occasions, wasn’t the least bit troubled by the exertion. He threw the massive, heavy doors open easily as our farm’s old garden gate and led me in by the hand, through the grand great hall with its tall ceilings and ancient carvings. He never turned his eyes to look at any of it, but kept focused right ahead. As far as I could tell, he took no notice of how empty the place was, or how the fire in the central hearth was all but dead. Up through the back stairwell I’d gone up when Arvid took me to the private chambers, to speak with me in his bedroom (how I’m sure he wished we’d done more than talked!), and across the wide war room, he brought me before a pair of doors.

“To the balcony,” he sighed, his eyes aglow and smile bright. He gave my hand a squeeze. “Are you ready?”

“I don’t know what we’re doing.” I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know how I felt about seeing him again, about knowing that he was the Listener, about knowing that he was willing to gamble the world on his lack of faith in the Thalmor, that he was a killer, that he was the greatest hero of our time. There were too many conflicting emotions, and he wanted me to care about the _balcony_? My opinion on the pretty view would have to get in line behind all the other opinions I’d yet to sort out.

Apparently, he wasn’t the only one excited to be on the balcony. Guards stood in small groups. A battle formation, I quickly realized, around the porch. Toward the front, a small force of metal and muscle stood at the ready.

“Companions?” I whispered to Brother, who answered with a shrug.

“I left the Jarl to decide how many soldiers he wanted present. Looks like Gray-Mane doesn’t fuck around.” He lead me through, to the edge of the porch. Then, to the whole host of swords and shields gathered, he shouted, “We’re here! Party can start!”

The Companions looked our way and turned to whisper among themselves. I recognized them as Njada, Athis, and Torvar, three of the shield-siblings who had perhaps the lowest opinions of me. None would care that my brother had found me, but they certainly shared a meaningful glance. I wondered what Arvid would hear about this later. How he and Farkas would react. They would, no doubt, be worried and angry on my behalf that my brother found me.

Arvid, Farkas… Gods, how I missed them both.

And, while I was distracting myself with upsetting thoughts, where was Thrynn right now? Were they back in Riften already? Was he still angry with me? Had he forgiven me, or decided to never forgive me? I knew it was one or the other. That was just how Thrynn was.

Big Brother was looking up into the sky. I’d never seen anyone look so… _inspired_. He didn’t release my hand, eh even adjusted his grip so that our fingers were intertwined with a love and familiarity I never thought I’d feel again, as he shouted up to the heavens, “ **O-- _dahviing!_** ”

My feet stumbled backward at the force of his voice. If he’d shouted it at me, I was certain I’d have gone deaf. What power was that? The power to be heard in every corner of the earth. I used to brag about how my Big Brother would be known all over Tamriel; if he wanted to, he could spread his own legend.

“What was that?” I asked, and though I used a normal, conversational tone, it sounded like a whisper compared to his display.

“Just wait. It’s coming.”

“What?”

“A dragon. Don’t worry. It won’t hurt you. I kill them all the time.”

A dragon? Another one? I just killed one a week ago, I wasn’t ready for another one already! “Wh-why?! Did you call it here?! You want it?!”

“Do you trust me?”

Without realizing I’d said it, the answer spoke itself for me: “Of course.”

The words were lost to the roar above us. A shadow eclipsed us from high above, and all around, swords were drawn and arrows nocked, but Brother smiled like none of it mattered, like all he heard was my answer. He said something I couldn’t hear, but I knew what it was.

He only took his eyes off of me when the dragon finally made its first pass. Huge leathery wings spread out wide and rode the wind like the kites we used to play with during Midyear celebrations. It flew past the balcony and out of sight, followed by a cloud of arrows. Some stuck out from between the plates of scales, but most descended uselessly over the ledge and out of sight.

I should have been terrified, but then again, when have I ever fled from a dragon? I leaned over the balustrade to try to get a better view of it as it came back around, and right as I saw it open its mouth, I aimed a spear of ice for its maw. Though not quite lucky enough to damage its larynx, I at least managed to smash the spear onto it nose. The missile exploded into crystalline shards and a fine white mist, and the dragon roared a frustrated noise instead of fire.

Which was good enough for me, really. I readied another spear and aimed for its wing as it flew past, but the hunk of ice veered far from the course as soon as it got close, and fell with the second barrage of arrows. He shot a ball of fire from his tongue, which hit and threw back an archer by the left side of the patio.

“It’s the wind!” I complained. It wasn’t just sailing around like a kite as I’d thought, it was distorting the air and using the wind to its advantage, so that we couldn’t hit it with great accuracy, but it could certainly hit us.

“It won’t be flying much longer,” Brother promised me. He was waiting for something. Timing the dragon’s passes, I realized.

The dragon swooped by once more, it’s mouth opening wide to release of stream of orange flame. Two guards at the edge of the balcony were caught. I never saw what happened to them, only heard their screams as their comrades pulled them back from the front lines. I took one look at brother, and glanced back to the people getting injured. All the dragon had done was breathe lazily at us, and soldiers were already dropping. If Big Brother had a way to fight the dragon, then I had to trust him with that part. My place was elsewhere.

I released his hand. I could feel his face, even when I wasn’t looking. I just knew the worried glance, the concern that I was too afraid or too overwhelmed, that was almost certainly on his face. So I called over my shoulder, “I’m going to heal! You take care of the dragon!”

And he was shaking his head, thinking that healing the burning guards was a waste of time that could be spent doing something glorious and heroic. I didn’t have to look at him to feel what he felt, like a spriggan feeling the rain on a tree across the forest, but I knew he wouldn’t stop me.

Wounded soldiers were being pulled off the front lines and against the wall. I called a little ice into my hands, just enough that I could try to pry the white-hot metal off of them. My touch brought forth plumes of steam and angry hisses, but no one stopped me. The guards knew to trust me. Once upon a time, I saved every single soul to face a dragon that attacked this very city.

I did not accept casualties.

“Hold still.” I recognized him. His bunk was next to Arvid’s in the barracks. We both had curly hair, and we would joke about how unmanageable it was, even though he kept his shaved so short he was practically bald. He was badly burned, but I kept my hands over him and pushed as much energy as I could into him. He trembled at my touch, coughed at the battle being waged between his mortality and my hubris within his body. But damn it, I would not let him die.

I hardly had any potions left. My bandolier was dismally understocked with my favorite brews. I growled every time my hand itched instinctively for where my magicka potions were usually kept.

“Hold still,” I said again. I didn’t need to tell him that, he wasn’t moving, but I said it over and over, “Hold still, hold still,” like there was somewhere I thought he was trying to go.

He was trying to _die_.

I’d killed people. When I didn’t want to, when I didn’t mean to, I’d killed people. But to see the light fade from his eyes, as I literally poured my being into him to keep him with me, it broke my heart in a way I hadn’t felt since I laid Janan to rest almost a year ago.

Before I could cry out or start shaking him, or begging, or whatever else I wanted to do to try to bring him back to me, a voice beside me said, “Over here! She needs healing!”

Mourning would have to wait. It would be up to his brothers and sisters in arms to lay him to rest, but my job wasn’t over yet. I scrambled across the stone floor to the next patient and started healing her, cursing my lack of potions, and just repeating the process all over again.

She was far more receptive to my spells. Before my eyes, the burns calmed, the blisters shrank, and the red of her skin began to quiet back to a translucent paleness. Thank the eight and Talos, I didn’t think I could stand if she died, too. I left her not entirely perfect; she would be fine, and I had more people dragged to me with every passing moment. I was two more soldiers in when I saw the female guard get up to her feet and start back for the sounds of steel.

It was only after most of my patients were at least stabilized that a particularly loud scream of draconic made my head turn so fast my neck cracked.

_When in Oblivion did the dragon get in here?_

The patio was huge, yes, but the dragon took up much of it. Big Brother was right at it’s face, slashing and stabbing, his blades sinking into it with greater ease than I’d seen anyone achieve. The dragon snapped its jaws for him, and as if he could see the slightest coil of its muscles at the start of the motion, he’d already started into a sideways roll before the dragon even got close. When he was back on his feet, his sword cut downward along the dragon’s plated temple while the dagger in his off-hand stabbed into the flesh between mouth and eye.

As long as my brother had the beast’s attention, people weren’t getting injured. The moment that set in, I was on my feet, rushing to his side like the true idiot I was. No armor, no, just Ama Nin’s dress. Almost no potions left, and certainly nothing useful in this situation. Magicka depleted. I was about to be useless, and I knew it, but like always I knew I just couldn’t stand off to the side.

Brother stepped left, so did I. Brother swept his sword in a wide left-to-right arc, and it was followed by a blast of cold air into the open wound. The dragon opened its mouth to shoot fire at us; Brother grabbed me by the waist, careful to keep his grip reversed so that his dagger would not cut me, and I threw a spear of ice into its throat. He didn’t let go, though, but pulled me along, guiding me backwards toward the huge doors back into the castle. I asked no questions, I just followed his long strides, matched his rhythm step-for-step, like a dance we’d both been doing since childhood. When he stopped, his left leg went out, and I stepped behind it without any need for explanation, letting him put himself between me and the humongous monster. Even so, I let my right arm slip beneath his and let frost pour from my fingertips to keep the dragon at bay, in place. He kept his arm out of the way by lifting his over his head, making some sort of signal.

Like we’d choreographed it. Was fighting always supposed to be so easy?

And then the ceiling fell. At least, that was what I thought, when I saw a massive beam of heavy wood and metal drop from above. If anyone had been standing near, they’d have been crushed, and I was certain that the dragon would have a few broken bones when I heard the crack of scales on impact. Some sort of contraption at the center snapped closed around the dragon’s neck, and he was prisoner, at Brother’s mercy.

“...Did we just capture a dragon?” I asked, dumbfounded.

But Brother was already laughing. He sheathed his swords so that he could pick me up and give me a little twirl. “You were brilliant! _That_ was brilliant! It actually worked!” He took my face in his hands and gave me a celebratory kiss. But when he looked at the dragon, that mirth was erased, replaced by a determined expression that left me wondering if I’d just imagined the gleefulness only a moment before.

He took my hand again, and together, we walked right up to the dragon’s snarling face.

“Dovi pahlok drunaan juli krongrah,” Brother said, as easily as speaking in common Tamrielic. A cruel smile, just a shade off sinister, spread on his lips. “Orin brit ro.”

The dragon said something else. I could barely keep up, but I could hear the venom in its voice, with undertones of embarrassment. I’d never known dragons to have conversations before; they usually just came flying through killing things. To think of them as intelligent enough to carry a conversation made it even scarier, even if it already was held firm against the floor.

“Hind siiv Alduin, hmm?” it asked. Alright, there was one word in that that I definitely recognized.

They started exchanging more words in the dragon’s tongue. Brother was almost always stone-faced, except a few moments when he smirked, and I assumed he was saying something bratty. Otherwise, he was grim, all business.

“It seems they have much to discuss.” Farengar, the strange Nord court wizard, came up beside me, stars in his eyes, hands wringing with excitement. “I’ve never heard the dragon language spoken fluently before. Incredible.”

“What’s this all about?” I asked, mystified. First, I was dragged up to Dragonsreach by my estranged brother-turned-Listener, then he called a dragon, then he _caught_ a dragon, and now he was having a conference with it? I felt as lost and confused as I had back when he grabbed me in the Wind District.

“To get to Alduin,” Farengar explained. “The Dragonborn proposed asking one of his own where the World-Eater is, so that he can complete the prophecy.”

I exhaled through my teeth. That wasn’t the answer I’d expected, but it made enough sense to be passable, I supposed. But if this meant that Brother would want to go hunt down Alduin after this... 

“Farengar, do you have potions on hand?” I doubted I would have time to brew my own, so his would have to do.

“Not with me. In my laboratory, there are some--”

“Do you mind if I grab a few? I’m guessing Brother’s going to want to head out sooner than later, and I seriously doubt I have an option if I’m going with him or not.”

“Very well, very well,” he said, waving me off. Maybe he was just too distracted by the dragon, or maybe he figured, being my brother’s sister, that I would just take them anyway. Either way, he was too rapt in the scene before him to care, and I managed to slip away for the doors to the castle almost unseen.

“By Talos!” a guard gasped as I walked past. “A dragon! We captured a dragon!”

“Unbelievable!”

“I knew he was the Dragonborn, but I never imagined _this_.”

“This has to be the most insane thing I’ve ever seen!”

Well, they were _right_. I snuck through the castle, back into the silent, empty halls, searching for Farengar’s quarters. They were easy to find, just off from the central hall, filled with all sorts of mystical crystals and tomes. He even had an alchemy table up against the wall. Did I have enough time to just make some fresh? I didn’t know how long Brother would be, or how intent he was that I stay with him for whatever happened next, but I first gathered what little bottles I could find with just a cursory search of the laboratory before I took on any bigger projects on the table.

His potions were all weak. I needed only to pop the cork to smell the unrefined recipe. They would do, but Farengar was a wizard, not an alchemist.

I glanced over my shoulder to the door before I started sifting through what reagents he had on hand. The hall was still abandoned. I assumed that meant I still had time, so I went straight into some of the fastest potion-brewing I could. I didn’t want to waste any time calcinating butterfly wings. Swamp pods would work, but getting through the membrane without damaging the seeds was always such a bother…

“What are you doing in here?”

Of course. I knew how silently he could move, his talent for being invisible on a whim. Big Brother was looking over my shoulder, and I jumped so violently that the butterfly wings all flew into the air and descended in taunting little circles. “You scared me!”

“What are you doing?” he asked again, black eyes on my work. “Potions?”

“It sounds like your work isn’t done. And I thought, since it’s probably going to be dangerous--”

“Dangerous is one way to put it. Finish up quick. Odahviing is waiting.”

“...” Wait a minute. “Odahviing…? Is that…?”

“The dragon? Yeah.” He leaned his backside against the edge of the table. “You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”

“Heights? Ehm… I’m afraid of _falling_.”

“Oh. Well, you won’t fall.”

“Brother, can we please talk?” I knew he wanted me to hurry, but I put the pestle down anyway to let him know how serious I was. “There’s a lot we really need to discuss.”

His eyes stayed locked on the decorative screen Farengar had set up on the other side of the room. Chewing his lips wouldn’t give me an answer, but for nearly a minute, it was all he did.

“I failed you. In a lot of ways.” Was it my imagination, or did his voice crack halfway through? “I’m going… to do right by my destiny. I’m going to save the world, be a hero, all that shit. Just like you told me I would. Before there was the Elder Scroll, there was you, and I was wrong to ever… Ugh. I was wrong _a lot_. But it won’t ever happen again.”

“That’s part of it.” I dropped my voice to a barely-audible whisper. “But what about you being the Listener? What about you killing the Emperor’s cousin?”

“They never proved that!”

“Did you also kill Emperor Mede?”

Brother’s back straightened uncomfortably. “That was never proven, either.”

“You won’t even tell me?”

“I did. I killed both of them. And many, many more. Do you know how many people Cicero’s killed? Or Olev? Or even Thrynn?”

“My point is…!”

“There’s nothing to discuss. I grew up. So did you. And I think if Mother and Father saw us right now, they’d be really proud. What else matters?”

“I was _alone_!” For the second time in one day, I felt my eyes sting.

“You’ll never be alone again,” Big Brother assured me. He turned around, smiled, and nodded to my potions. “Meet me on the balcony in ten minutes. Have everything you can imagine possibly needing.”

“What if I don’t?” I asked through trembling lips.

“Then I’ll find you when it’s over. And pray to any divine that’ll listen that you’ll forgive me.”

I wasn’t paying attention when he left. Only to the butterfly wings, the veins carefully traced with my knife to help it absorb better into the blisterwort oil. I tracked down a couple empty vials, broke a single swamp pod seed into pieces at the bottom of each, and added the oil. It’s best to just shake the mixture in the vial, and give it another quick toss before drinking. The seed bits will like to stick to the bottom of the vial otherwise.

My life was ruined by his carelessness. I lost everything to his selfishness.

_Don’t think about it._

And he grew up to be a monster. A violent, cruel, sadistic monster. The Listener.

_Don’t think about it._

Swamp fungal pods are a bit of a misnomer. It’s more of a plant that happens to be very, very attractive to lichen, and so is most often found covered in the slimy stuff that grows everywhere in the moors. The pods are the most valuable part of the plant because, thanks to the thick, leathery shell, the seeds tend to be the last part devoured by the lichen and retain the majority of the plant’s useful properties the longest. The outer membrane does have usefulness in making poisons, however, as the tough surface secretes a filmy substance, like opium that leaks from poppies. The plant uses it to keep the fungus from damaging the seeds, but animals tend to respond to the stuff with muscle spasms and paralysis.

I could have died with Mother and Father, and he never would have known the difference. And now he’s going to pretend to care?

_Don’t think about it._

I could put some of the poison into one of the potions. I could still save the world by making sure that Alduin wins, and the Thalmor will be put back a kalpa in their plans. I could even kill him.

_Don’t think about it._

I corked the last of the potions. It had been more than ten minutes. I took another five to carefully arrange the vials in my bandolier. Only then did I step out from Farengar’s laboratory, my heart in my throat, my feet heavy as lead.

Or was it all really my fault? I held on to the hope of finding him, long after anyone else would have given up. I refused to live a life without him. I could have moved on, settled, started a new life on my own like he never existed. My obsession with him was to blame. My obsession with having a home, a family. I should have given up. I will never know a home again.

_Don’t think about it._

I thought he’d have been gone by now. That he would have left. But as soon as I gently nudged the door open, there he was, throwing it open from the other side with a grin wide enough to take in his ears. “There you are! Odahviing was getting impatient!”

“You said ten minutes,” I grumbled, miserable by multiples.

“And I also said I’d never leave you behind again.”

I could see over his shoulder that the dragon was free, looking as bored as a scaly reptilian face can look.

Big Brother took my hand again. It felt more and more natural every time he did it. “Don’t be afraid. I promise, you won’t fall.”


	49. In Which They Clear Skuldafn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skuldafn Temple. Full of dragons, draugr, and sibling bonding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huuuuge thanks to [DipFrick/NoctSolarium/Queenly--Dweeb](http://queenly--dweeb.tumblr.com/) for being my beta reader and over-all amazing person. Not only does she have some of the cutest OCs around, she has done some of the most precious [art for Briinah](http://queenly--dweeb.tumblr.com/tagged/the-briinah%27s-story), and you should all go and shower her with praise.

I knew I was screaming, but I couldn’t hear the sound with the air rushing past so quickly, so violently. I felt Brother shaking behind me, and I recognized the rhythm to be laughter. His arms tight around me made me certain I wouldn’t fall, fingers coiled and digging just barely into my shoulders to tell me that he would never let me go. The girth of the dragon’s neck beneath me was equal parts comforting and disconcerting. On the one hand, I could feel his strength, and I knew that he wouldn’t accidentally drop me. On the other hand, cold steel-like scales against my bare legs were anything but cozy, and offered a constant reminder that this was a thrice-damned _dragon_ I was riding!

I was riding a dragon. I was riding a dragon. I was… How was anyone supposed to wrap their head around this?

Only a few hours ago, I’d woken up in Whiterun, my biggest concern being over the two men who loved and currently detested me. And now here I was, my dreams and nightmares realized in a way I’d never have seen coming. 

Where in all Oblivion was this dragon taking us? The tundra of Whiterun Hold, dotted with dark patches of wild heather, disappeared behind us and gave way to towering pines that still could never reach us. A river, a forest, and then it dissolved into the bright red clay earth and brilliant turquoise of volcanic pools. And even those were eventually broken by rocks and craggy cliffs and then snow and ice that hung in the air in lung-piercing crystals.

The dragon flew higher, impossibly high now that the peaks of the mountains rose to meet us. If I thought Winterhold was cold, I wasn’t prepared for the chill of the wind or the frozen sky. I could only be thankful that the dragon was able to soar at remarkable speed, and a journey that would have taken days or weeks was to be completed in a matter of hours instead. Though I didn’t say a word of complaint, as no doubt the wind roaring in our ears would have drowned out my words, Brother took one arm off of me to adjust his cloak so that it fell around the both of us. I ducked closer to him, and watched breathlessly while Skyrim passed beneath us.

Kyne’s breath in my hair, Akatosh’s deranged avatar ahead, I closed my eyes and prayed to Mara for the first time in months. She could, and would, do nothing to protect me. It was out of the gods’ hands, as Olev had said, their age was long over, but perhaps she could lend me the strength of heart to see this through, the inspiration and love to fight beside my brother and complete his prophecy.

From far over the sharp mountain tops, I could see a small dip in the stone, and unexpected valley that might not have belonged. Built out of the surrounding mountains, a temple was cradled within. When compared to the range around it, it looked tiny, but the closer we got the more I realized the thing might have been a metropolis. Easily the size of Riften, it had several levels. And, since the construct was supposedly a tomb, I suspected that meant it went several levels underground as well. The dragon began its descent, and soon I could see figures ambling along the walkways and avenues, things like men but drawn and thin and wearing tattered clothes and armor that was more red rust than iron.

“What are people doing here?!” I gasped, amazed. The dragon had slowed, and was now doing a low turn to find a place to deposit us.

“They’ve been here forever. They’re just draugr.”

I blanched. “Draugr? You mean, the Nordic zombies?”

It was Brother’s turn to be shocked. Though he was behind me, I could sense the drop of his jaw. “You’ve been in Skyrim _how long_ and you’re telling me you’ve never seen one before? I can’t walk to the fucking market without one trying to shout my clothes off!”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Not by much.”

“...Is that an actual… shout?”

“I bet I could figure it out… Hm...Govey… qah?” He tasted the words, repeated them slowly with different inflections under his breath, and heaved a frustrated little sigh. “I’ll have to ask Arngeir.”

We descended at the bottom of some stairs, to a small clearing before towering stone temple. Before we’d even reached the ground, I saw the shadow of a dragon swooping across the steps like a cloud covering the sun.

We weren’t just interlopers, we were fools, small mortals of flesh and blood who dared walk in the domain of dragons and the risen dead.

My heart stuck in my throat, my lungs froze, and for a moment all I could do was stare upward at the two behemoths and count the seconds until we were inevitably fried in its torrent of fire--

Brother pulled me sideways so suddenly that I wasn’t ready to catch my footing on the ground. He rolled smoothly out of the fall while I smacked the stair painfully. While I recovered, he all but appeared in front of me to shield me from the dragon, though I wasn’t sure what protection his lone form could provide.

I wobbled to my knees, shot a spark of healing energy to my sore side, and watched as our dragon reared up, said something fierce-sounding in Draconic, and proceeded to… fly away.

I cried, “Where is he going?”

“He doesn’t want to place any bets until the last hand is dealt,” Brother explained. His sword was in his right hand in such a swift motion it might have been there all along. His left hand caressed the off-hand dagger at his hip, seeming to weigh whether or not he wanted to bother with it. “Should have brought a bow. I’ll just have to take one from a draugr.”

“I don’t know if we have time for you to ask one to--”

“Lucien! Take my sister up to where those draugr are wandering around, find one with a bow and arrows, and bring it back to me. And if anything happens to my Baby Sister in your care, Sithis won’t be able to put the shreds of your soul back together. Understood?”

Oh. Apparently he not only had a plan, he was ready to execute it. We were not alone; the silhouette of vague blue light that I had seen once in the Dawnstar Sanctuary flickered into being at my brother’s call. No, it wasn’t light, exactly. It was like looking at the edge of clear water, where matter changed and the light was distorted. He looked at me with the same cold eyes I remembered, seeing through me, seeing every drop of blood and imagining how he’d spill it if he were only just slightly more inclined, but held back by something that he didn’t dare contest. Was it fealty to my brother that stayed his thirsty blade? Or was it the same force that kept the Guardians of the Dawnstar Sanctuary from harming me even when they fought Brother to their own destruction?

When he looked at me, did he see the “rightful” Listener, like Cicero did?

I couldn’t ponder it too long. The spectre was on the move in an instant, and I was scrambling after him while Brother shouted something behind me. Even yelling in the other direction, I felt the whole world shake beneath me, and my ears rang, and once again I was thankful not to be in the direct line of fire.

The stone steps looked like they’d just go on forever. Why couldn’t our dragon have dropped us off at the top? I followed Lucien quick as I could, my leg always shifting beneath me uncertainly as it adjusted to its unfamiliar state of usefulness.

There were zombies in Cyrodiil. Most people would only ever cross them if they dared venture into the sewers of a large city. So many things could cause restless dead, from errant magic to deliberate work of necromancers, to diseases that linger and fester even in death. I’d glimpsed it, but I’d never had to deal with it myself --that was a long story for another day. Even still, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw waiting at the top of the steps. They weren’t rotten corpses as much as they were dry, brittle mummified things, like the discarded shells of cicadas covered in grave dust. Their eyes had an eerie glow, blue like the glaciers outside of Winterhold when the sun hit them just right.

When its mouth opened, I thought it was about to breath a mouthful of dirt at me. Instead I was hit by a voice that had the force of a battering ram. One moment I was standing, and the next I was sliding back down the stairs I’d fought so hard to run up, skipping like a pebble down the side of a mountain. My still-recovering leg stung painfully with every roll, until I came to a stop. For a heart-stopping moment, I felt myself almost start to roll again and my descent begin anew, but only just managed to scrape my hand on the rough stair to keep myself in place.

This was going to be a very, very long day.

I worried that they would be upon me before I could get my bearings, but I heard the sound of metal on crystal, the scream of ethereal weapons striking physical metal, and staggered up to see Lucien effectively taking their attention. He swung his dagger for the kill every time, aiming for major arteries and vital organs that had long since run dry. But, with my distance, I was afforded the chance to prepare a spell, take aim and--

_Zzzap!_

The chain lightning spell arced from my hand, to the nearest draugr, then split around Lucien to electrocute the one furthest. I could scarcely hide the satisfaction I felt at seeing the archer’s bow drop from his hand to clatter on the walkway.They stood, stunned just long enough for Lucien to knock them each roughly from the stairs’ landing and down to the ground far below, and they shattered in a crash of bone and rusted metal.

And, sitting innocently on the ledge, halfway off, was the bow Brother wanted. I scurried to it, and looked down to the battle below for Brother.

It was easy to find him when he was illuminated by the infernal glow of dragon fire. He rolled out of the maelstrom of flame, hopping onto one foot and pirouetting in a single fluid motion to face the dragon with a smile that I could see from there.

I called out and threw. It was a good thing he was so far down, because without gravity on my side I wouldn’t possibly have been able to throw accurately or far enough. Without even needing to look at me, he threw his arm out to catch the weapon. A moment later and I was tossing the draugr’s discarded quiver cursing myself as I watched a few arrows fall out and tumble down the stairs. He caught the quiver and what remained of the arrows with as much ease, and then he was moving again, running across the courtyard for a pillar. He took cover, and while the dragon was distracted trying to pursue him, I started shooting lances of ice into its scales.

Of course, I’d made myself known, and while Brother was readying an arrow, I could see it weigh its options: go for the feisty one who was hiding, or the stupid one standing way up above, which isn’t really such a long distance for something that could fly.

Its head swiveled on a serpentine neck, aiming its maw right for me, when a shout down below distorted the air and hit the dragon with all the force of… well, another dragon. It stumbled backward, razor-sharp claws drawing lines in the ground. Before it could recover, one, two, three, four arrows came rapidly at it, piercing through wing, neck, nose, and eye.

From on high, I shot my own projectiles at it, lances of ice that gouged the flesh between plates of scales and splintered into it. It screamed in pain, spread its wings wide, and beat them heavily downward to send a wave of dirt in all directions. It was coming for me, and I knew it, and I began to stagger backwards when it dawned on me that there was nothing I could do but keep on shooting it with magical missiles. I prepared another spear of ice between my shaking palms, knowing it could well be my last.

Then I heard it, Brother’s voice ripping through the air like a dull blade through thick parchment. “ **Joor-- Zah _Frul!_** ”

Its wings locked at it dropped, like a baby bird that hadn’t quite learned how to fly.

I don’t think I had ever seen Brother look like that before. Even far below me, there was a cloud across his face, a visage of rage that I couldn’t recall ever gracing his handsome features. Livid, incredulous, appalled, _blood-thirsty_ , he was upon the fallen dragon in a heartbeat, leaping onto its back and chopping his off-hand dagger into the dragon’s temple and his sword straight down between its eyes. 

He stood over it, letting its blood spray upward at him, his mouth moving. He was saying something to it as it died, something acidic and angry and cold.

I meant to go down the steps. I meant to run up to him, to calm him, tell him it was alright but we had to keep going, but anything I might have intended to do was entirely forgotten when the dragon’s black and red scales smoldered and burned. One moment, it was a corpse of a dragon like any other I’d seen. The next, its flesh sizzled away, turning orange as sunset then white as the sun. And there Brother stood victoriously atop it, glowing, the essence of the dragon’s very being spiraling around him like a divine wind of Kyne and into him with a gratified breath.

When the light died, all that remained was… remains. A skeleton, bare and still as if it had been resting there for millennia. Brother stayed for a moment, perhaps meditating. When at last he slid off its body, I realized I’d been holding my breath.

“Are... you okay?” I choked. He was many flights of stairs below me, but the world had gone so still and silent that I knew he could hear.

Brother called back, “Perfectly. Thank you for worrying. I got a bit… miffed that it thought it would go after you, but I feel better now.” He ascended the stairs three at a time, caught me in a quick hug, and kissed the top of my head. “Ready to keep going?”

“Are there going to be more dragons?”

He laughed, the ringing, charming laugh of a prince straight out of a fairytale, which I supposed was my answer.

He only ever let go of me when something needed to be defeated. Draugr, some shouting at us, some flinging spells, some firing arrows or brandishing swords. They all fell to us as we infiltrated their sacred temple. We moved as one, never letting anything come close to hurting the other. It all felt like one long battle, like any rest between was only spent moving for the next. I lost track of what direction we’d come from and where we were going, or how many draugr we’d defeated. It was all just a blur of spells and running and hiding behind crumbling walls and--

“Do you know where we’re going?” I asked breathlessly. This must have been going on for some time now. The overcast sky was certainly darker than it had been on our arrival. I didn’t know where we were anymore, only that there were so many stairs and so many turns between us and where we’d started from.

Brother tugged me further, toward yet another towering flight of stairs. “This looks like the main temple up ahead.”

Ugh. How were there so many stairs? Who built this temple to just be all stairs?

I shuffled along after him, eternally thankful that my leg was in far better condition than it had been. There would be no way I could have made it at all in my former state. But just because my leg was better did not mean that I had any more stamina than before. I was still huffing and wheezing all the way up, trailing along after Brother and wishing so desperately that he would slow down even a little bit. He was still pulling me by the hand, and I considered just falling and letting him drag me the rest of the way up. It couldn’t be worse than this, really.

We stopped right outside the massive doors. He stood there, looking at them, his face flushed with exuberant excitement, mine flushed with the effort it took to climb what I estimated to be about a million steps. While he was busy savoring the moment, I turned to look down at the labyrinth of stone sprawled below us. Someone built this. Someone worshipping the dragons built this, and it must have taken generations. And here we were, to finally put an end to that legacy. How many of the original occupants, now just husks and mummies, did we leave in bits and dust down below? How many yet waited for us inside the temple?

The entire scene was insane to me. I was still amazed that I’d met a vampire on one occasion, and now here I was, at a dragon temple, fighting draugr, about to see an Elder Scroll’s prophecy through to the end. My head was swimming.

“Brother…?”

“Yes, Sister?” I heard his feet whisper across the ground as he turned to me, and felt his black eyes on my back.

“What happens after this?”

He chuckled. He must have thought I was being cute. “We’re joining the Stormcloaks. Strengthening Talos as a Tower of Mundus, taking the Thalmor down a peg, warding off Landfall for another kalpa. Happily ever after.”

“We’re never going home, are we?” Never mind that the mention of joining the Stormcloaks made my skin crawl. The mountains surrounding us on all sides eliminated a sense of a world beyond. The courtyards and broken pieces of temple beneath us were eternal. A wind of despair blew down into the valley from the tops of the mountains behind us. From here, it was hard to even imagine Kvatch anymore. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember what our house even looked like, not with the oppressive scenery crowding my every sense.

“Skyrim isn’t your home yet?” The smile spreading on his face was audible in his tone. Every syllable got lighter, and any moment the words would be floating out on laughs. “I thought you were the Spirit of the Reach.”

“This province has tried to kill me--”

“Look at you. You’re not a baby anymore! You’re so grown up. You’re so strong. It becomes you. You’re flourishing here, and you don’t want to call the garden you bloomed in ‘home’?”

“Is that why you don’t want to leave?” It came out bitter. I didn’t even realize that was how I felt until I felt my teeth graze my tongue and felt the question spit from my lips. “Because you’re a hero here? Some sort of backward, murdering, stealing, selfish monster of a _hero_?”

“How is that wrong if it is the case? You can’t tell me that, after everything, you could just go back to farming potatoes. Is that the extent of your ambition? Your dreams? Can you really stand at the top of the World Eater’s Temple, and lament that you could be shoveling dung right now?”

I had a million other things to say. Accusations, arguments, and names I wanted to call him. His hand on my shoulder, gently turning me into his waiting embrace, stole them all.

“I don’t blame you for being mad at me… But that’s a separate issue from going home. Our destiny is so much bigger than Kvatch.”

Our destiny? I felt the cool surface of Brother’s shrouded armor against my cheek. He was the Listener, the Dragonborn, the hero of Skyrim. I was a farm girl…

How ridiculous. I wasn’t a farm girl. I hadn’t lived on a farm in years. I hadn’t tilled soil, harvested crop, or sown seeds. I probably wouldn’t remember the right way to hold a scythe if I had to. I was an alchemist, and a healer, and damn it if I did get that farm back, what would I even do with it?

I swallowed the thought.

“I’ve… never been inside a barrow before.”

“Nothing to be afraid of. They’re not as dark as you would expect.” He turned us both to the temple, and swept an inviting arm outward. “Would you like to do the honors?”

I went to the door and placed my hand on the intricate iron door. Though the rest of the temple appeared to be rough-cut stone and in shambles, the door was evidence of how much craftsmanship and care had gone into the building’s construction. I wondered how breathtaking the temple might have been if I’d seen it before it had become a ruin. I tried to open the door, but years of rust between the hinges and heavy material made it almost impossible. Brother helped me after I struggled a moment, a charming little chuckle in his throat all the while.

Was he always so cheerful? I wondered. When I saw him in the Dawnstar Sanctuary, all darkness and death, I never could have pictured the dreaded Listener smiling and laughing the way he was doing with me. Was that it? Was he as happy to see me as I’d always hoped I’d be to see him?

The temple was massive and, as promised, rather well-lit by ancient braziers. The flames lit the whole dust-covered atrium in an orange glow. The ceiling was so high that a dozen dragons could have been looming up on the stone buttresses. Banners hung from rotted rope from the pillars, walls, and ledges, what might have once been gorgeous tapestries now nothing more than tattered rags, discolored by age and eaten by moths and slowly torn down by the hands of time. It seemed ironic that this was probably the most beautiful building I would ever see -- I was just a few thousand years too late to appreciate it at its peak.

“Keep your wits about you,” Brother whispered, and his voice hung on the stale air, muffled by the thick atmosphere rather than echoing in every direction like I would have anticipated.

Already I could hear the creaking leathery joints of the dead as they rattled toward us. Keep my wits about me was putting it lightly. I wasn’t so sure I could keep my wits at all. It teetered out from a corridor, and two glowing eyes scanned the shadowy entrance for the intruders he knew were there.

Brother knocked an arrow in the ancient bow and took a sidelong glance at me before letting it loose.

~~~

He had to lead me by the hand half the time. Whenever I took the lead, I led us in circles, which Brother said was cute at first, but we were both fast getting tired. It had to be at least dusk by now, if not later.

This had been an exhausting day in every sense of the word, really. Part of me wanted to believe this was all a dream, or some vision created by one of the many Daedra I’d pissed off.

When Brother wasn’t leading me through the winding halls, he released my hand so that we could fight the inevitable waves of draugr who met us in every room and often lurked in behind corners, waiting for us. He could throw his bow over his shoulder and draw his sword and dagger quickly as a blink of an eye, always a flurry of arrows or swings, just death come alive in whatever way he saw most fit for the occasion. And I was always there, at his side. Too focused to be afraid, I threw barriers up to catch axes and swords and set their brittle skin on fire. They fell before us with remarkable ease… for the most part.

The wide room sported curious pillars and what seemed like random little stones jutting up from the floor. Old carvings adorned some of the larger ones.

“What is all this?” I asked, leaning in to inspect a metal relief on one of the short stone… things? Was it supposed to be decorative? I couldn’t quite tell, but it looked like a fish. Maybe a very fat slaughterfish.

“It’s a puzzle,” Brother answered. He wasn’t looking at the weird things on the floor, though. Instead, he was turning his head every which way, taking in the walls and the ceiling and the front of the room and the back…

_Crash!_

Something happened. My head jerked so fast toward Brother that two vertebrae in my neck popped. “What was that?” There were so many pillars and stones that I couldn’t see around--

Brother was moving.

“Brother?”

 _Crash, crash, crash!_ They came in quick succession, one after another, all around the room. The sound of hundreds of pounds of metal smashing down on rock echoed everywhere.

They crawled out of sarcophagi like roaches, one after another. It was only then that I realized the walls were not some sort of stone panels, no, the walls were rows of coffins all lines up side-by-side. The sound of banging came right behind, me, making me jump out of my skin and hurry away from the coffin I’d been standing dangerously next to. Each knock against its prison make dust and rocks roll out, and when the lid finally broke loose, I was lucky to be far enough not to get crushed.

I knew it was different. It stood taller than the others, and wore black armor that reminded me of when the moons were both new and the sky was empty. Its helm sported twin horns, pointing upward to make it even taller, sharp as if something were intended to be impaled on the top.

“Sister! Behind me!”

The once-empty hallway was getting crowded fast. Anywhere I looked, more of the draugr was coming out.

[i]“Fus!”[/i]

Damn it, not this again.

I managed to stay upright, but slid on the balls of my feet backward as easily as if I were slipping on ice. Brother’s hand shot out as I slid past him, catching my arm to keep me from getting pushed right into another draugr. Then he spun me round, putting my back to his. He would pivot occasionally, to my side or to intercept a blow in front of me. I read his movements easily enough. HIs body guided me, either one of his legs against mine to adjust my footing and angle or his shoulder pushing me to whatever side of him was safest. It was like being led in a dance, like the safe and warm feeling I got dancing under the Gildergreen with Farkas’s big hands on my waist. This was an infinitely more dangerous situation, but I remembered that feeling, that trust.

Brother made his movements bigger. Instead of just a step or pivot, he traveled across the floor. And I, in tune with the melody he danced to, followed along.

Duck. Dive. Run. Ice, lightning, ice again. Brother stayed right by my side, and the details of the battle became a blur even as it happened. The only thing I needed to focus on was Brother, he was the constant, the point of reference, the Mundus around which all this chaotic Oblivion revolved. Stay close to Brother. Step with him, move by him, dodge the sword, let Brother catch it with his, Brother throws the sword out, making an opening for my lightning. It was smooth and easy, and just like our fight with the dragon back in Whiterun, we were in sync. He led me around the different pillars, using them to lead me as well as our opponents in a dance, manipulating carefully what angles we left open and in what direction out assailants would have to come at us in. I didn’t try to make sense of his methods. They were working, and if there was anything he knew how to do, it was fight.

“Above!” he said, and I ducked. With the same breath he continued at the Very Angry Draugr, “[i]Krii Lun Aus![/i]”

It stumbled back, I shifted behind Brother, and Brother went in hot with a wicked grin and a flash of his sword. The dagger in his off-hand twinkled in anticipation, and for a moment I swore I felt the bloodlust radiating from its razor edge.

Whilst he dealt with the Very Angry Draugr, I kept the others off his back with handfuls of fire that I tossed at the gathering swarm, and for every spell I let loose he chopped mercilessly at the draugr.

I’m not sure when the crowd thinned. Eventually, there were only remains of remains on the floor, some in pieces, some smoking in places. I was out of breath, but didn’t feel tired.

“Brother?”

“It’s clear,” he confirmed.

“That was a lot of them.”

“You kept calm, though! You did great!” Brother was smiling. I didn’t like the look of it. Something was wrong, the way his dimples creased looked off, and his jaw was clenched…

“Are you hurt?”

“No, no. Just give me a few minutes, I’m fine.”

Arcadia’s voice prattled off various things that could be wrong in my head. “If you’re injured, you can’t just walk it off and forget about it! Wounds don’t go away if you ignore them long enough. You’re an adventurer, surely you know to take your health more seriously--”

“Hushh-shush-shush…” he was murmuring, putting his back to one of the pillars of stone and sliding down. He knelt there for a minute, haunches on his ankles and his weight distributed between the balls of his feet and the small of his back on the stone. “I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, for the love of-- I’m a healer, you idiot!” I wanted to sound angry, but it only came out teasing at best. I sat beside him and felt around his shoulders. “Where are you hurt?” There was no blood, no obvious swelling.

“It’s nothing. Bruised ribs, maybe. I took a few hits to the stomach. I’ll be fine, it’s just uncomfortable.”

“Well, lucky thing about dungeon-delving with a healer is that even ‘uncomfortable’ can be dealt with. Move your arms.”

He obeyed, but his black eyes were now wandering the room. “We should find a place to sleep. Not here. Too big, and some of the sarcophagi didn’t open. This looks like a puzzle room anyway.”

“Puzzle room?” I wasn’t looking around. I was too focused feeling for his ribs through the thick leather of his armor and tight mass of his muscles.

“You didn’t notice that both the doors forward are barred?”

“No. I was busy noticing all the monsters trying to chop us in half.”

“Point. We’ll figure this out, and then find someplace small and cozy to sleep. Someplace it’ll be hard for anything to find us if it comes looking.”

“We could just stay here, since we’ve already killed most everything. We don’t know if we’ll find a safe place ahead.”

He shook his head. “We won’t know that this place is safe. We don’t know if the coffins that didn’t open are just biding their time or too decomposed to fight. And I don’t want to be woken in the middle of the night to a draugr standing over you.”

“We’d hear them break out.”

“You don’t realize how easy it is for dead things to hide in ruins. Let’s just solve this puzzle and see what we get.”

He had it worse than bruised ribs, that was for sure. Whatever hit him in the stomach had done so _hard_. It was surprising he was able to hold it together. I counted three broken ribs, and as my restorative magicka worked into him, I felt a worrying amount of internal bleeding. And he was just planning on taking a breather for a few minutes! How had he survived this way without me?

The puzzle, when he explained it to me, pointing out the pillars and the decorative reliefs around the room, hardly seemed like a puzzle as much as a challenge of observation. The reliefs blended into the walls, just small carvings in stone tablets of vague shapes which we would have to match pillars with. The pillars were heavy, but could rotate at the base with enough force. 

Brother took care of most of it, and had me figure out what reliefs requested what corresponding image.

“There are two doors and two reliefs,” I said. “So, one for each direction…” The door to the right seemed to lead to a dead end, a very narrow hall that had collapsed from above. The door left opened up to a far more open corridor.

“So, right first,” Brother decided, turning the center pillar to face the image of an eagle toward me, “we hide in the rubble, in a small space where nothing will come snooping around for us, and then go right when we wake up.”

I never imagined camping out in an ancient Nord ruin. It was about as comfortable as you’d imagine, in the rubble and dust, trying to find a comfortable position. Among the wreckage was an old chest that was mostly intact, which Brother forced open and adjusted the rubble around to make the inner lid into a flat surface to rest in. He sat down on the lid, worked the rocks behind him into something like a seat, and laid back. I curled up on top of him, and we threw my cloak over the both of us for warmth and just a little more concealment. It was horribly cramped, and the rocks pinched and poked all around us, but I fell asleep with ease to the lullaby of Brother’s breath. I was snuggled up on his lap, and he curled protectively around me, heart beating steadily and soothingly into my chest.

We slept like the dead. I only stirred when Brother woke me with a kiss and nudged me off of him.

Nothing killed us in the night, so day two was already off to a promising start.

“We have a lot left to do,” his hoarse voice whispered in the dark. He passed me something hard and crumbly, a sort of seed cracker ration, and that was that, back to business. The minute he was on his feet, he was running.

We went through another draugr-infested room, complete with an altar sporting an incomplete draugr mummy just to make sure I was nice and on-edge from the start. I was surprisingly happy to find that the next few halls we went through had more of a spider problem than zombies. Spiders I knew how to deal with. They shriveled with fire, and when they looked dead, they _were_. The sticky webs didn’t bother me, especially when it only took a spark from my hands to set the whole web alight.

I was getting into the mindset of a dungeon-delver. Already I knew what to look for, the sounds of shuffling feet to listen for, and the stone tablets sporting animal carvings to keep my eyes out for. Brother no longer had to drag me around like a helpless child.

By his side, we might actually do this. Every time he lost his breath, I passed him a potion. Every time he felt the slightest pain, I healed him. And he tore through enemies like paper dolls, aided by my magic over his shoulder.

We crawled out of the spider infested halls, through more of the temple plagued by its unliving inhabitants. Up stairs, down stairs… Who built this place to have so many levels? It was ridiculous.

Up a spiral staircase of wood that should not have held our weight (Brother had to coax me and reassure me with every step that I wasn’t going to break through the steps and fall to my death; he didn’t yet understand my relationship with heights and falling from things), and then a gate, and it seemed like there wasn’t much higher we could go. We’d been ascending for the most part, and quite a bit lately. Surely be now we were just about at the top--

My thoughts were stopped short when Brother grabbed me by both shoulders and yanked me back.

“Wh--?”

“Tripwire!” he explained, pointing to a thin line of twine across the corridor. How it stayed taut after all these years was beyond me. It was lucky that, in all these thousands of years, one of the draugr never got it.

“Why are there so many traps in a temple?” I huffed. “Pressure plates, little darts coming out of walls, what sort of place of worship is this?”

“The sort that worships dragons as overlords,” Brother said. He took my hand and assisted me over the tripwire, thought it was only a few inches off the ground. We continued on, and this time I kept my eyes on all the walls and every bit of the floor.

Another Very Angry Draugr, charged us not far beyond that, only this one was distinctly different in that he had a thing of metal and glass stuck in his chest, the claws of some sort of statue impaled through his armor and into his hollow chest. Brother took the monster’s head off, and went straight to yanking the trinket out before its body had even hit the floor. “Claw key! He announced. “You’ll like these. I was thinking of getting something like it made for my house in Windhelm.”

“You mean the one that I was nearly killed in?” I said with a hard sniff.

“Hey, now, he’s dead thanks to me!”

“Not out of justice for me! You just went and murdered the man on some other whim!”

“Yeah, well, he had to go on about his sister, and frankly, it pissed me off.”

“What about it?”

“It was hard, seeing how much he loved her,” Brother confessed with a shrug, never slowing his pace. “But he was so… so stupid. You could tell that he didn’t even really remember her anymore. He was using all these random parts of random women, like it didn’t even matter what he made, as long as he could pretend it was her. Idiotic drivel about bringing her back… If I lost you, nothing would ever be able to replace you. Certainly not some monster of rotted… Oh, hello, darling!”

His attention was suddenly stolen by something up ahead, what appeared to me like any other dumb rock wall in this dumb rock tomb. It wasn’t until Brother practically skipped to it in excitement that I realized there was something special, something different.

It was one huge slab of stone, taller than three of me and wide enough for a dragon or two to curl up within its slight curve. How many men would it have taken to get that thing in here, let alone up so high up in the temple? Its surface was carved with what I assumed to be some ancient Nordic, all straight lines and carefully spaced characters. But as Brother got near, I heard him whispering to himself, reading the archaic text that must have gone centuries untold without being uttered.

A single phrase echoed as he whispered it, then he said it again, with a bit more force. “Strun,” he said, experimentally. “ _Struuun_.” He worked the word a few different ways, stressing the ‘S,’ rolling the ‘R,’ stopping short on the ‘N’ until every part of it felt just right. Once he seemed to know the word well enough, he shot a wicked little grin over his shoulder at me. “Watch this!”

Close enough to kiss the wall, he said with confidence, “ _ **Strun!**_ ”

The phrase on the wall shuddered, and from each of the little carved lines, a tendril of electricity zipped outward. Those lines lit up, shining, warm and magical like the auroras in the night sky, and Brother drank in the light until it faded around him and the wall was still once more.

“What was that?” I asked, taking a single careful step forward. Was this some other trap?

Brother laughed. “That was how your Big Brother learns to talk to Dragons! Come on! I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to use that one, probably not while you’re too close by, but that will be a fun one!”

I gave the wall one parting look. Magical secrets in plain sight, unraveled by my Brother’s sheer desire to talk shit at dragons. It was a special kind of irony.

Eventually made it to a small atrium with a little room on one side, and a huge pair of doors on the other. Frigid wind whispered through the seams and from between little holes in the rotted wood.

“Alright… Back outside, probably at the top of the temple,” Brother said. He pointed to the side room. “I think we’re safe in here for now. Rest and prepare… I think this is it, so get ready.”

I lit a fire in the room’s small empty hearth, and we sat in front of it together, our backs against an altar.

“So, what’s waiting for us out there?” I asked. “Alduin?”

Brother shook his head and wrapped one arm over my shoulders. We answered as he pulled me close, “No. Alduin is in Sovngarde. Devouring the souls of the honored dead in the realm of Shor. It’s pretty personal.”

“Personal? You’re not even a Nord.” Of course he was. The fire in his eyes as he described Alduin’s crimes, it was the bitterness I would expect on any “true” Nord’s face. That was how Skyrim was, it just had a way of making Nords out of everyone, Anoriath had once told me.

“Shor is the Nord name for Lorkhan, and I’m Shezarrine, so…” He stopped himself short to stare into the flames. Finally his silence broke with a chuckle. “If you ever get the chance to meet Hermaeus Mora, be careful what you ask. You’ll get a lot of answers, and they won’t necessarily make the world any less complicated. But now I know what I need to do. I need to stop Alduin, and then, I need to reinforce the towers of Mundus, especially Talos. That’s my destiny, whatever other names and titles and responsibilities might get tacked on along the way.” His smile got wide, and the dimples on his cheek went deep. He leaned over and kissed me, then ruffled my hair affectionately with gentle fingertips. “But now I have you. And there’s no one I would rather share this destiny with. The burden of being… everything that I am, it’s not so bad when I think of it like that.”

“If it matters that much, why did you leave in the first place? And never come back?” Though the words were sharp, I nestled close to him.

“Because even if I’ve always known you were extraordinary, I never would have brought my baby sister into a ruin, or into a fight with a dragon! You grew up into something I never would have imagined for you. Though I will regret for the rest of my life not taking you with me from the start, I know why I left you behind. I can’t tell you how proud I am that I was proven so wrong.” His other arm wound around me, pulled me tight against him, and his lips went to my forehead. “Now that I’ve found you, I’m not letting you go. And I know you don’t like that I’m the Listener--”

“Saying I ‘don’t like it’ is putting it mildly. I don’t like stiff collars on dresses. You being in charge of the _Dark Brotherhood_ is something a little more than that.”

Brother just _shush-hush_ ed me again and kissed me. “You’ll get used to it. It’s not so bad. I know Cicero misses you! And you’d love the rest of the family--”

“I am not going near that place ever again!”

“We can discuss it later. Alright, Sister?”

“My answer won’t change.”

“Say that to Cicero’s teary-eyed face!”

Ugh. Between Brother and Cicero begging me, I might actually break. I shook my head stubbornly, though, and whimpered, “Should we really be making plans for the future when we still have to go into the realm of the dead. How ironic, if we died there…”

“We’ll be fine. The Elder Scrolls would mention if my legend ended like that.”

“Would they? The Scrolls aren’t exactly known for being especially straight-forward.”

“We’ll be fine.”

At least he was confident.

One last kiss, a squeeze of his arms around me, and then he was pulling both of us to our feet.

“Okay. Alright. We’re… we’re going,” I said. Maybe it was how quickly we stood up, but my head was swimming. I felt suddenly breathless. This was actually happening.

Brother took my hand and we walked together to the big doors. And, together, we pushed them open, letting in a screaming gust of wind and snow. The weather had turned in the day and a half we’d spent in the temple proper. Now everything was icy and the sky howled above us.

We were on top of the temple. There was just one level above us, a dais higher up that we would have to loop around to. We’d barely taken a single step outside before Brother pulled his borrowed bow from his shoulder and let fire at a draugr that ambled toward us. It was another Very Angry one, but Brother’s arrow hit it hard in its glowing azure eye, and it fell backward off the platform, presumably to the courtyard below.

That was one way to deal with them.

Alas, he wasn’t the only one waiting for us. As soon as we started across the platform, more draugr appeared in full force, and above, I heard the echoing roar of a dragon, its terrible voice bouncing off the mountaintops and turning the whole valley into a bell for its cries to ring in.

And we started anew, my magic flying and Brother’s blade singing together. Our synergy was only disturbed when a dragon swooped down, shouting a trail of fire over us. I covered Brother and I with a protective barrier, holding back both flames and draugr’s weapons alike as Brother shouted back. My ears were ringing from the loudness at my ear, but I didn’t suffer as badly as the dragon, who plummeted out of the sky as though Brother’s words had placed the weight of a mammoth on its back.

“You take the draugr, and I’ll keep the dragons off of you!” Brother said. He had to repeat it twice before my hearing was clear enough to understand him.

“Dragons? There’s more than one?” I was too busy alternating between blocking swords with barriers and countering with spikes of ice to look around myself.

Brother paused to count them. “I see… four right now. There may be more waiting for a chance to strike.”

“ _Four_?!” I nearly screamed. My magicka flared up with surprise and my ice spear turned into a blizzard that knocked three draugr to the ground.

“I’ll be fine. And you can handle these,” he assured me. And when he stepped out of our little formation, and wasn’t there to lead me anymore, I felt the cold wind rush in where he’d been and felt lonelier than I had since burying Mother and Father. “Just keep going to the top! I’ll meet you there!”

“Please don’t leave me alone!” I begged, but he was already gone, off to slay _four_ dragons like the reckless, idiotic hero that he was. Which left me with a dozen mummies. I just needed to keep my barriers up, and whenever opportunity allowed, use spells that would hit more than one. Fireballs exploded, torrents of razor-sharp ice crystals, chains of lightning that bounced from one to another and back again -- if only their muscles weren’t leather, or that might have actually stunned them longer than a second.

I had to keep going. Brother, wherever he went, was taking on four or more dragons at once! If he could do that, I could do this! I sent up a barrier to buy enough time to down a magicka potion, one to speed regeneration and fortify myself for what was to come, and as soon as the barrier flicked out of existence, I replaced it with a storm of flames that I pulled out of Aetherius and up from the stones beneath our feet. My mind reached outward to the magical realm, and the magic reached back, reached through me, and manifested in raw power to burn the draugr with greater heat than a Dwarven furnace could contain.

“Brother?” I shouted over their ashes. Where had he gotten to? I heard roaring and shouting, but all the sounds echoed off the temple and the mountains and it was impossible to tell where any of it was.

So I just continued on with the mission I was given. Get to the top. Meet him there. That was all just get to the…

I turned to the huge set of stairs that would lead me to the highest point in the temple, and stopped short. My breath left me, and for many heartbeats I could only stare at the pillar of light that rose from somewhere up there and into the heavens.

It shone with every color, a rainbow, but the light seemed to be moving, flickering with energy indescribable, alive with power unknowable. I began to climb the steps, but I couldn’t be bothered to watch my footing when, as I got closer, I saw the light shift and get clearer. The light was shimmering, dancing, reds and blues and greens. The source of Skyrim’s auroras, I thought in amazement, the seat of magic in the north. It twinkled like starlight and disappeared into the blackness of unseeable Oblivion above, dissolving high above me into a million shining sparkles of pure… pure magic? Pure energy? Aedric divinity? I couldn’t place what this was, but my heart sputtered for every second I watched it.

Even through the gusts of snowy wind, the maelstrom of ice that blew off the mountains, it shone through all of it like a knife that could cut shadow itself. There was a burst of fiery light from behind me, but it didn’t distract me from the spectacle of color straight ahead. I was like a moth to a flame. I could spend the rest of my life just staring at that light.

Then it flickered out, and I felt part of my heart break. I had made it to the top, the source of the light, and standing atop the dais, overlooking where the light had been coming from, something hovered. Its clothes were blowing, but not in the direction the wind blew. A face turned to look at me, a face wrought Nord steel and fastened to a mummified head, permanently stoic and unfeeling, eyes shut as though in meditation. It pulled a staff from the stone, and, when it seemed to make sense of my presence, the staff lifted my direction.

I felt the electricity lift my hair with static before the wall of lightning even made its way to me. I darted out of the way just in time, but I felt the magical power of the staff spark outward in every direction. A sting in my toes told me that just being close would be enough to pull me into the electrical current.

Another potion was in order, I thought. More magicka, and magical defense. I would need it, I thought, bringing up another barrier to shield me while I drank down the concoctions and tossed the glass vials unceremoniously to the ground. Another stream of lightning came at me, and I heard the vials shatter when the concentrated storm went through them.

He liked lightning? Well, I could play that game, too. Both of my hands pulled lightning to life, and between them a single bolt formed, shooting from me to him with speed and force. He wasn’t knocked back, only kept gliding closer with his hauntingly blank face locked on me.

“B-brother?!”

He had four dragons. I had some draugr and this thing. I’d be alright. I just had to keep my wits, even when every part of me wanted to scream and hide behind Big Brother.

I could do this. I was the Spirit of the Rift, blessed by Mara _and_ Sanguine whether I wanted it or not, protected friend to the Thieves Guild, honored guest of the Companions, ally to the Dark Brotherhood. And in my heart, I was Nord.

Somewhere in my peripheral, I saw a great flash of light like a sudden fire accompanied by the dying screams of one of the dragons.

I ran out of the way of his staff’s wall of lightning, a relatively simple feat only a few days before I never could have accomplished on my bad leg. I drew fire into my hands, and released, lightning, then released, ice, and I didn’t let up until I saw his cloak tear into tatters, his body begin to sag, his aura of insurmountable power subside bit by bit.

That’s when I heard it, louder than before. A roar, a shout, but closer. The Dragon Priest looked up and I followed his gaze to the sky. Against the grey clouds, I could see the dragon’s silhouette. I could also see the thing on its back, slicing and stabbing with abandon. Brother. He looked hurt, but determined, and damn it all, he was too far away for me to help!

And he was slipping.

And I was getting desperate by the second. My spells started anew, with renewed determination. A spear of ice impaled itself through the steel of its mask, and, not to be anything less that thorough, I ran at the thing, wrenched the staff from its skeletal hands, and shoved it back. Just the thought of lightning brought the staff to life in my hands. I didn’t even need to force me own magicka through the conduit, it just pulled the energy right from its own stores, and with no more than a wave it shattered the air with a dozen tendrils of lightning.

The Dragon Priest fell to the ground, dissolving into ash at my feet.

And I didn’t have the time nor the care to investigate further. When next I looked up, I saw the silhouette against the storming sky, and I saw the slimmest shadow above me, descending.

I’d spent my time in Skyrim looking for a home. Looking for a way back home to Kvatch, looking for a place to call home here, making homes and leaving them, finding new families only to go my own way.

But there was my home. The only home. The only family. All I’d been searching for, all I’d wanted, there he was, falling from the sky.

I couldn’t live without him. Not again.

I ran to the top of the dais, screaming, begging, pleading. It was all just shrieks, but in those moments of absolute terror and despair, I imagined all prayers I would have said with more time. Mara, you can have me! Sanguine, Vaermina, Nocturnal, whatever price you ask, whatever you want, just please don’t let me lose him again!

There was no way to know how it would work, but I wasn’t going to waste time figuring it out. Instead, instinct took over. I now stood where the Dragon Priest had turned off the light, and there was Brother above, falling fast just above. Below the dais, where the light had shone out of, were symbols carved in the stone.

My hands moved of their own accord. My heart raced. My mind went numb, ready to break completely the moment Brother hit the ground.

And before I knew what I was doing, I was slamming the base of the staff into the stone, into a small hole in a little rune in the dais.

The symbols below shook. The stone crumbled, came alive, and shifted, and as it broke apart the light poured out from beneath, rising once more into the glorious spring of beauty as before.

Just in time for Brother to fall past me, into the glow where he dissolved into starlight.

“Brother?!” I was screaming. I just kept screaming, wordlessly. I flung myself from the top of the dais to the light but the moment I did, the stone was back, perfectly in place as if it hadn’t moved at all. My hands pounded against the rough carved symbols, clawed at the edges for it to open again, but all was solid, and I knew that below me there was no Sovngarde, just the old temple.

Every part of me shook, but not from the cold.

The screams of the dragon died away. It was finally dying, but there was no conflagration or sign that its soul had been reclaimed. The draugr were defeated and everything was silent.

I dropped back heavily onto my rump and looked up at the sky, counting the flakes of snow as they lazily drifted down on me. I held my breath and tried not to cry as it set in that I was left behind once again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Briinah 1 is almost over, and I'm already getting some ideas and plot together for a sequel. I would love input on what you think you'd like to see in the future of Brina. I'm considering moving away from first person, for one thing. It will mean we won't hear Brina's dumb trains of thought, but it will make it easier to follow different characters. Would you guys like that? I'm also thinking the sequel will have a lot more to do with romance and relationships. How do you feel about that? Do you have any other ideas for what you'd really want to see new or different? What would be good to see stay the same?
> 
> I really appreciate everyone who has been so patient with my slow updates, weird tangents, and ~~way too much sibling kissing~~. I hope you've enjoyed Briinah, and I hope you enjoy whatever else I write for you~~


	50. Dragonslayers

Alone. _Alone._

The word echoed in my head, merciless, maddening. Of all the places to be left, I was at the top of a Dovah temple in the middle of the mountains, a place where no one could come and find me except for a dragon. And I was quite done with dragons, thank you very much.

I don’t know how long I sat on the carved stone symbols, waiting for some sign that Brother was going to come back. Hours passed. I watched the sky lighten, the snow clear, and eventually the sun appeared to the east. Exhausted and afraid, wondering every second if I was going to die here in this emptied ruin, I just sat until the sun scooted to the top of the sky.

Once it did, I wrapped my cloak a bit tighter around myself and laid down. I was too frightened to sleep, too worried for Brother alone in Sovngarde, but I needed to rest. My eyes stung and my legs were sore and all the magic I’d been casting the last couple of days had my head pounding.

There was nothing I could do. Nowhere to go. Would I die wondering if Brother survived or not? If he succeeded?

It was only after the sun began its descent and was halfway down that I moved. My joints ached from sitting so long and my heart was heavy, but I needed to get out from under the open sky. So I walked all the way back down to the door back into the temple proper, back to that little room Brother and I had rested in before the final battle. The fire had long-since died, but there was more than enough dried bits of things around to toss into the hearth and ignite with a snap of my fingers.

I wished I had some of Brother’s seed crackers. They tasted awful, but at least they’d be something. More than that, I wish I had a thicker cloak to snuggle up in. Or, best, I wished I had _Brother._

With the fire going again, I laid down in front of it and watched the flames devour the bits of linen and broken wood. As far as I knew, there was no way for me to escape this place on my own, but I would look in the morning. Perhaps what Odaahving said was outdated information; he had been sort-of dead for a few thousand years, after all. Maybe there was a pass now, or a path.

That was how I spent the first day alone. Moping and being generally useless. The second day I started picking through the temple, destroying draugr who’d missed the action and wandered into me. I didn’t know what I was looking for; maybe a tunnel to get out of the valley, or some deeper corridor to lead me to a cave that might get me out of this secluded mountain range. Maybe a map. Anything. The people who lived here and built this temple couldn’t have all come carrying goods and furnishings by dragon back, could they? There had to be another way.

The best that I found was thousand-year old booze in what must have been a dining hall. And, as hopelessness settled in, I sat down at a rickety old bench, set my whatever-was-in-the-bottle down on the inch-thick dust of the longtable, and uncorked it.

The smell was so sweetly rancid that I blanched. But holding the bottle to the light of a brazier, I could see no sediment. Whatever this was, it was in remarkable condition for something so ancient.

What harm could I do now? I thought, bringing the dirty thing to my lips. I was going to die here. May as well die drunk.

“Not if you don’t want to.”

That didn’t take long at all. He was there the instant I swallowed my first gulp.

“And here I thought my predicament couldn’t get worse.” I’m not sure if he was mocking me or meaning to comfort me, but he wore the Breton facade that he used to wear around me. “If you’re trying to get my soul in these last few days before I starve here, you can save your breath.”

“You just don’t look like you’re in the mood to drink alone, is all.” He sat across the table from me, elbow on the dirty surface, chin in his hand, drunken grin firmly in place.

“Just go. I’m not interested in being owned by anyone, whether I’m doomed or not.”

“Listen to you!” He laughed heartily and took a swig. I don’t know when, but at some point the bottle had left my hand and found his. “I’m not saying a damn word about your soul. You just looked lonely. And this is no place for a party.”

I rolled my eyes. Brother would be proud of me if he knew I was giving a Daedric Prince sass. “Because I’m sure you came here from whatever wild orgy you were at just to keep me company, without having any ulterior motives.”

“Oh, I want to get you drunk. I want to see you so drunk you don’t know which way is up, and to see you lose yourself to madness and passion. But I don’t want this to be the last time. Whether you accept my blessing or not, little Brina, you’re fun. Too fun to let the party end so soon.”

He handed the bottle back. It was sweet, syrupy, smooth going down then burned like the Badlands the moment you took a breath. And, despite my better judgment, I lifted the bottle in a little salute.

I wouldn’t give him my soul. But I’d let him try to take it. I’d let him try and try, and take every boon he had to offer.

But I would not let myself die alone. Whatever it took. I fought too long and searched too hard and damn it, if I was going to die…

It was going to be with Brother.

I was selfish. At the end of a very long, difficult, and lonely road, I was finally feeling selfish. And I did not want to die here.

“Cheers, then.”

 

I will spend the rest of my life fighting the pieces of me that are not perfect. I will detest my faults, I will blame my vices, I will feel shame at my shortcomings. And sometimes, I will lose those fights.

But I will never give up. I will never give up on myself.

And neither will he.

I knew who sat beside me before I opened my eyes. I felt his warmth, I recognized the feel of his hand on my cheek, and I heard his voice on his quiet breaths. A calloused thumb brushed my jawbone, right by my ear, drawing idle little circles to trace the shapes of my curls.

“Brrr?”

“Yes.”

“Yhukkka...?”

“I’m fine. Thank you for caring. How are you feeling?”

“Ahmamrrstrrr…”

“Apt. That’s about how you look, too.”

One eye, puffy and sore and sticky, opened and immediately shut when it met the light. “Ugh.”

“I’d offer you a potion, but all the vials in your bandolier were filled with brandy when the Greybeards found you. Which might still help, come to think of it. Brandy?”

“Where…” Oh, good, I still remembered words. “Where are we? Grey…?”

“Greybeards. Right. You’re in High Hrothgar. Wulfgar found you in front. You were curled up in the chest that pilgrims leave alms in. And yes, it was adorable.”

“I don’t usually deal with Daedra. But this time I felt like I didn’t have a choice. And Sanguine...” I opened one eye again to an experimental crack.

Brother’s hazy silhouette nodded against the warm yellow candle light. All I saw was his shadow, like he was just a smudge of darkness on the serene backdrop of the temple. “Far be it from me to lecture you about getting mixed up with Daedra. But now that you’re awake... You should sit up. I’ve been so excited to tell you this. Here, let me help you… There, are you alright? Lift your back, I’ll put a pillow behind you. There. Comfortable? Are you ready?”

I forced both of my eyes on him, though they leaked with tears and the light tore my head right open. The story that he told me was a flurry of names, ancient heroes I’d never cared about, but oh, he knew all their stories by heart since we were kids. Sovngarde, the afterlife of heroes. People who inherited some part of Shor’s spirit. The spirit of Man, the spirit of change and passion and beautiful mortality.

“It was incredible! Amazing!” We sat together on a stone bed, covered in old and shedding pelts. Brother nestled up close beside me, where I assume he’d been asleep as well before I awoke. His eyes were alive, as though his mind were still far, far away from the stones and furs that surrounded us, as though he couldn’t be further away even as he sat right next to me. “You looked up, and you could see the twisting fabric of the edge where Mundus and Aetherius and the Dreamsleeve all meet, all color and light and beauty. And you can feel it, the memories, and even though you don’t know, or can’t be sure that any of those memories are yours, you just felt this nostalgia. In the pit of your stomach, so strong you want to cry or be sick and you can’t quite tell which. And it all trickles down, the sheer force of memory and time, it falls down on you and weighs so much, the air was so heavy with all these emotions that just can’t all fit in you at once. It’s in the atmosphere. Memory. And the people there, they feel it, they breathe it, because they are memory and they know it! They know that they are remembered by every still-living soul, and when you look up, you know that memory will never be truly lost no matter how many times the universe is unraveled and resewn, Kalpa after Kalpa.”

I didn’t follow much of what he said, more about Kalpas, the Dreamsleeve, Lorkhan and the conglomerate over-soul of Talos. He knew too much. Parts of it made me uneasy, because I swore I could see the images that Hermaeus Mora put in Brother’s head reflecting from his black eyes. But I listened, and especially got excited when he got to the part that mattered: Alduin.

In a glorious battle, he confronted the beast with a host of legendary warriors. Together, they brought Alduin down and defeated him, presumably sending the flawed aspect of Akatosh back to the Time God for him to rethink a little bit before ending the Kalpa next time.

“How long did it take you? You make it sound like you were in Sovngarde preparing for a long time,” I said.

Brother’s head lowered slightly. “Ah… When I got back here, Paarthurnax said I’d been gone about ten days… Which is why it’s a very good thing you were found by Sanguine. Not that he’s usually a good thing, but by the time I could have come back for you…”

“I would have starved to death,” I finished for him.

“But if it weren’t Sanguine, it would someone else. There are a lot of divines that owe me favors! And surely they’d all know what good graces they’d be in if they helped you.”

“Do the Daedra really care that much about what one human thinks of them?”

“Don’t underestimate the mortals, Sister.” Brother flashed me a dashing smile. “Nirn is literally the center of the universe for a reason. The Aedra were able to create, the Daedra are able to play, but fate is in the hands of the mortals. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Yes, the Daedra would have cared.”

The temple would be our home for a few days while we recovered from our separate adventures. High Hrothgar, as hospitable as anyplace at the top of a mountain would be, was a rather small building carved out of the Throat of the world. Narrow halls filled with silent men, I thought the quiet would drive me insane. Brother assured me that we would head down the mountain soon, but we both needed time to recuperate - him from his battle with Alduin, and me from the eight days spent with Sanguine that I could not and would never remember. All I knew was that I had a very painful, very hand-shaped bruise on my rump that hurt badly every time I sat down on our shared stone bed.

The Greybeards were always looking down, always quiet, like ash-colored ghosts that roamed the halls. None looked me in the eyes. It went from mildly disturbing to positively haunting all too quickly.

For a few days, I slept off the worst hangover of my life while Brother packed, spoke repeatedly but briefly with the only Greybeard who would talk at all, and rested. I helped to heal the worst of his injuries, and generally offered what comfort I could. On a couple occasions I wondered about the Thieves Guild, but swiftly dismissed those concerns as purely masochistic. I would… cross that bridge when I came to it. But they might begin to wonder about me, especially if I never return to Riften and the next they ever hear of me is that I’m fighting for the Stormcloaks.

“We’ll leave in the morning,” Brother said late on our third night, after a particularly spirited conversation with the only talking Greybeard. Whatever words they’d exchanged had not been friendly, and Brother was red in the face from the moment he walked into our less-than-private living quarters. I sat on his back, rubbing at the tight knots in his muscles while he seethed over it.

He really didn’t take good enough care of himself; his skin was spackled with scars, and every sinew of muscle in his body was wound so tight it was a wonder how he even moved. On our way up to Windhelm, I thought, we would need to soak in the volcanic pool. It might do him some good.

“Are you sure you’re well enough?” I asked. My elbow dug into his shoulder blade, and he growled into the furs.

“Ughh… Yes. It’s easier to go down the mountain than up it. We’ll get to the bottom in about four or five days. Arngeir is letting us borrow some supplies just to get me out of here faster, but it won’t be comfortable.” He groaned as I hit another sore spot. “The sooner we get out, the better. I’m getting stir-crazy.”

We left long before dawn, before any of the reclusive monks were up and about. I was all too eager. For as long as I was there, to not have actually really spoken to or been introduced made me feel like a most unwelcome guest. Not that any of them would have or could have noted on my shameful arrival, or went out of their way to express their displeasure at our presence, but I was all too glad to leave High Hrothgar behind.

When the sun rose, and the world became bright, the air clear, I stopped. My feet could carry me no further for just off the path, Skyrim glowed golden in the dawn. A skeletal shape in the mountains across a little valley shimmered in the light. Below it, pine forests painted the landscape rich green. North of that, Whiterun Hold was yellow and white with the frost that coated the heather-covered plains. An irregularity in the flat expanse was Whiterun proper, probably just now coming to life with the new day. And beyond that, there was a Skyrim I had not yet seen. Would I ever see it? Would being with the Stormcloaks allow me to see the province that I now accepted as my home?

Suddenly, I was feeling selfish again. If only I could go past that stunning gold horizon! If only I could see the marshes and moors of Morthal, or the metropolis of Solitude! I wanted so badly to just point in a direction and go as far as I could! Skyrim was my home, and I was a Nord, and as long as I didn’t have to look for Brother, or hide from anyone, why not!

“It would be nice,” I said in passing, shrugging off the uncharacteristic streak of adventurousness. “Just to see more. Maybe they’ll want us to travel further west when we join the rebellion.”

“Hm. It would be nice.” Brother chewed on that for a while, or perhaps got lost in his own thoughts about his own adventures.

Really, I would have thought that going down the seven-thousand steps would have given us plenty of time to talk about some of the issues I had with his lifestyle. Like being the Listener, and a killer, and turning the whole Thieves Guild against him somehow, and about a million other things. I was sure I didn’t even know half of the atrocities I’d committed. We’d only just begun to descend, and I’d just opened my mouth to breach the subject, when Brother started first.

“So, you and Sanguine.”

Oh. I cleared my throat. “You said yourself, the Daedra would come to--”

“You knew exactly who he was, and didn’t sound shocked to wake up ten days later with no memory. Let me guess, alcohol?”

“...” Suddenly I wasn’t in the mood to talk.

“It’s alright. It runs in the family, and I’m far from blameless… I’m not judging you! I almost married a hagraven!”

“What?”

“Drinking contest with Sanguine, it got crazy, stole a goat.” _Ummm._ “Point is, I’m not saying it to judge you. I was just hoping to talk about it.”

“Could we talk about something else?”

“You’re in the Thieves Guild. Want to talk about that?”

“Anything else?”

“You don’t sound proud.”

“ _Please._ ”

“You and Thrynn. You could tell me about that.”

“Oh, please, Brother!”

“It’s a long way down the mountain. And we both have a lot to catch up on.”

“Does it have to be this?” I was pouting now, stomping my feet into the crunchy snow in frustration.

Brother thought for a moment. “Who’s Farkas? You cried his name back in Whiterun.”

My blood was boiling. And not for the reasons I would have expected. My hands moved of their own accord, ripping open my fur cloak to rummage through my satchel furiously. “You know what? We do have a lot to catch up on! And it’s not my alcoholism, or the men I’ve been with, or who my friends are! You want to catch up so badly? While you’ve been out, murdering people and causing a ruckus, I’ve been alone and hurt and--”

My fingers closed on the leather cover, and in one fluid motion, I tore the journal from my satchel. The ink-stained, smoke-damaged, bloody, discolored, bent, ripped pages fluttered in the wind like a bunch of angry bees, and it spurred me on.

Without thinking, my arm moved. The journal didn’t have far to travel, and Brother, so quick and nimble and dexterous, just stood in place, confused and worried. He could have dodged, he could have protected himself. Instead, the journal hit him, binding against his nose with a crunch.

He recoiled and yelped, but I was already moving, huffing and puffing and kicking snow.

“Sister? Wait! I don’t--”

All this time I’d been thinking about him. What he’d done. What had become of him. Where he’d been. But now that he was showing interest in what I’d been doing, well, I remembered how cold and afraid I felt in the Whiterun dungeon as the Stormcloaks stormed the city. I remembered how sick with grief I was when I killed the bandit on the road to Windhelm, the first man I ever killed. When I nearly died at the hands of the Butcher. When I barely made it to Riften in one piece. When Mercer nearly killed me, and the whole guild jumped in to help him do it. Nearly being cut in two outside of Dawnstar, while I wasn’t evading a squad of Thalmor hunters. Getting caught up in a battle with a cult. Battling dragons. Being alone for months in the wilderness. Slaying witches. Running away from the College of Winterhold. Being kidnapped. More dragons.

I’d been through so much, without him, and -- and how dare he say he cared now?! Now, when it was far, far too late! Why couldn’t he have been there when I needed him? Why did he never save me when I needed saving?

The snow built on my cloak and weighed me down. Cold seeped into my skin, down to my bones, so I fought against the creeping numbness by bringing a fire to life in my palms. I played it around my fingertips, watching the trails of light as they hypnotized and calmed me. I needed to keep my mind off everything else. Off all this unpleasantness. So after some time, I dug in my satchel and got Janan’s kalimba. It was sometimes hard when frost encrusted the metal tines and made my fingers ache from the chill, but plucking out tuneless songs did wonders to clear my head. No wildlife came near us, especially while I played. I must have sounded like a Wisp Mother.

Whatever I sounded like, it was a comfort. My own song, to my own melody, singing out a series of pointless sounds and drowning out all the unhappy thoughts that wanted to take over. Things like Brother being a killer. Me being an alcoholic. I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted to be silent and hide behind the music the rest of the way down the mountain.

I don’t know how long I spent, wading through the snowdrifts on my own. Pride kept my face aimed forward, and my mouth shut every time I stepped into a deep spot and fell forward on hands and knees. It wasn’t until the grey sky darkened to a sheet of coal that I heard behind me, with unprecedented meekness, “Maybe we should make camp here for the night.”

He’d been giving me plenty of space, I realized when I at last turned around. He probably never came within thirty feet of me for hours. The hood of his cloak was pulled over his hair, inches of snow piled up on the top of his head and shoulders, and across his face was a smear of blood that had frozen into red crystals from his nose to his ear, and another down his lips and chin when he’d apparently given up on wiping the mess away.

“Ah! Why didn’t you say I broke your nose?!”

“You looked like you needed to be alone for a while,” he answered in a tone softer than I remembered it. He held up my battered journal. The torn binding had new creases in it. “I got some blood in it while I was reading. Sorry.”

I wanted to say something, but no words came out when I opened my mouth, just a little sigh equal parts exasperation and heartache. I swallowed the lump in my throat to say, “Yes. Let’s make camp. And clean you up.”

He didn’t talk about what he was reading, but after we set up our little tent against the rocky cliffside and I brought to life a little fire for us, he got settled and started right back where he’d left off. My hands on his face, sending in restorative energy to ease the bruising and set right the cartilage in his nose did not distract him. I felt the need to say something but the silence between us seemed stronger than any words I could have used to break it. And Brother’s quiet was not judgmental, just completely focused; a few times I caught his eyes narrow, or his hand twitch, and I wondered if he was just tired or if somehow something was actually affecting him.

How many pages in that journal detailed things Brother wouldn’t want to hear? Of course, it was never about that. That journal was never to make him happy. It was so he would know what became of his baby sister when she was left alone. It was so that he could hear from me my thoughts and feelings, honest and real as the moment I felt them. My journal was finally meeting its destiny, but for the life of me I couldn’t decide whether that was good or not.

Hours passed, but sleep couldn’t take me, not when he sat right next to me, pouring over everything that I’d been through since coming to Skyrim a year and a half ago. I wasn’t saying a word now, but I’d never felt so vulnerable. This was the most honest I’d ever been, and we weren’t even speaking.

And when the sky lightened, and neither of us had slept a wink, Brother closed my journal and handed it back to me.

“...I wish I’d written it down, too,” he said. “Everything that had happened to me. Every time I thought about you, or home.” We started packing up our camp, and for most of that time and all through the morning he looked lost in thought, his black eyes far away and his lips pursed or barely mouthing words that for whatever reason he wouldn’t say out loud.

But now when we walked, he stayed right by my side. His arm looped around me to hold me against his side so that I felt his ribs expand into me with his every breath.

“We… have a lot to catch up on,” he said again.

“My journal--”

“Right. So let’s talk about it.”

I couldn’t think where to begin. I flinched at all the things he’d read, all the shameful and painful points in my past that he’d been let in on in the course of a single night. There was a lot to catch up on, indeed, and I surprised myself by what I’d rather talk about first. Funny enough, my lovers seemed like a poor choice of topic with my brother, who was as protective and territorial as ever.

So I opened up about something else, something he knew about to some extent from before. I told him about my struggles with alcohol, how I’d used it as a crutch, how I’d gotten a taste for it in Cyrodiil when I was all alone and uncertain about my future, how I’d gone too far on a few occasions since coming to Skyrim, and how I never even realized my habits were problematic until I made myself a booze-and-drug cocktail that threw me right into Sanguine’s realm. I told him all about how hard it was, but for the sake of my pride, sanity, and soul, I fought my impulses to drink. I told him about the times I’d slipped and failed. And by the time I’d exhausted everything I had to say on the matter, I’d exhausted myself mentally and emotionally as well. All I wanted was to curl up and cry in the snow.

My leg was still fully healed, but Brother carried me when I said I didn’t want to walk anymore. He carried me for an hour, and then we walked the rest of the day side by side, holding hands as he told me about his own drinking, and a short span of time two years ago when he’d been taking moonsugar until the day he ended up on the sharp side of a Khajiit trader’s sword.

Where there had once been strained silence, now there was so much to say. We talked endlessly, and the time disappeared like frost salts in a calcinator. We would have stayed up all night if we could, but after going the night before without sleep we ended up passing out on one another’s shoulder mid-sentence.

I woke against him, with the same conclusion I’d come to back at the temple.

Big Brother is my home. He always was, and he always will be, whatever our disagreements may be. And sure, him being a ruthless assassin makes the word ‘disagreement’ a grave understatement, but if there was anyone I could forgive for damn near anything, it was him. Our love was unconditional, even when unconditional meant giving him a lot of freedom to be a menace and general terror upon society.

The grey clouds cleared by the time we made it around the southern side of the mountain, and started heading eastward. This was the last stretch! Heavy snowfall turned to light dustings of fluff, and then to clear skies. Eventually, we could see through the clouds to the world beyond, to the green and blue of the Rift that awaited us. And within just a few hours of walking, the snow-packed path was stone and rock without a single patch of white in sight!

“About what you said a couple days ago,” he said while kicking over a little tower of rocks some pilgrim had assembled, “about seeing more of Skyrim.”

“What about it?”

“You sounded embarrassed to say anything. There’s nothing wrong with an adventurous spirit.”

“Ugh, coming from _you--_ ”

“No, I mean it! You’ve been just about everywhere in Cyrodiil, and conquered this half of Skyrim. You can’t tell me that you don’t appreciate life as a wanderer.”

“All I ever wanted was a home, though.”

“And you’re here! So?”

This was the part of the mountain that was easy to climb and would often see pilgrims. Which is why I thought nothing of the solitary figure walking toward us. Probably to meditate for a day before going back to Ivarstead. But the closer he came, the better I could make out his lanky frame and the rhythm of his steps.

“Is that…?” I gasped on an inward breath when realization struck me.

“Must have gotten tired of waiting. Probably went to Ivarstead when he heard about the dragons around the Throat of the World, so--”

I didn’t listen to the rest of his explanation. I didn’t care about any whys or hows, I just let go of Brother’s hand and ran, screaming, to close the distance between us. “Cicer _ooo!”_

When I started running, so did he until we caught each other in our arms and he squeezed so tight I thought I might burst.

“Little Sister, Little Listener!” His smile was as jovial, as wicked, as perfect as I remembered. Amber eyes ran through a gamut of emotions, a deck of cards being shuffled before my eyes, regret and happiness and relief and uncertainty, before settling on a wide smile whose emotion I couldn’t quite place. “And with two legs!”

I couldn’t get too happy to see him, I reminded myself. I was supposed to be angry with him. It was a moot point, since I was already bursting at the seams with excitement, but the fact remained that I ought to have been livid with him for helping Brother find me. It would have to be put aside for now, I decided the instant Cicero lifted me off my feet and swung me around like a child too short to waltz. He danced me to the bottom of the Seven Thousand Steps, and there was simply no being upset when he had me laughing so hard my ribs hurt.

He knew exactly what he was doing, too.

“I knew you were friends,” Brother sniffed. His upper lips was curled like something smelled bad. “Just didn’t realize you were this close. Do you have to touch her like that? Your hand’s on her hip, Cicero.”

Cicero continued to sing like he couldn’t hear.

“That was a friendly hint to move your hand. Before I cut it off.”

That time he heard. His hand moved, but the dance never slowed, never stopped.

For a few blissful hours, for the first time in a long time, I felt like everything was really alright. I had Big Brother. I had Cicero. The world had a future, and I had a destiny still waiting for me. We had a destiny to see through together, bright and promising as the clear blue sky and the joyful singing of pine thrushes.

I should have known people would be waiting for us. Down on the bridge over the babbling river where Ivarstead ended and the Seven Thousand Steps began, a swarm of people far greater than the entire population of the quiet village gathered expectantly. The moment we rounded the bend and descended that last little bit, the cheers began. Brother beside me seemed ready to burst, his eyes all but glowing and his smile taking in his ears. He pulled me from Cicero so that he could walk with me, one arm over my shoulder and the other clutching both of my hands. The crowd went on forever. They parted for us, and Cicero trailed a bit behind, and they all called out, and though it felt like it was taking forever they never once grew restless or let their voices die. How many people had come to see the Dragonborn following his grand battle? How many had waited here for him to come down from High Hrothgar?

The word was repeated on dozens of lips, echoing against the Throat of the World as though the people had learned to Shout. _Dragonborn!_ From the tops of their lungs, they sang his praise, they made the reality settle once more. The Elder Scroll Prophecy was true. It was done. And Brother, my Big Brother, saved the world. He was shaking with laughter and every shade of elation I could imagine. The shaking stopped suddenly, and I realized he was holding his breath.

Pride swelled in my chest, but was shattered when the softest sound, hardly intelligible in the excitement, behind me whispered, “The Spirit!”

The folk of Ivarstead had not forgotten me. They’d seen me at my worst, alone and frustrated and so, so very wrong. And yet, even coming to them in desperation and hopelessness, they regarded me with respect. More than respect -- reverence and near-worship! What would they say of me if they saw me at my best? If they saw me at the temple, slaying a Dragon Priest at the Gate to Sovngarde?

They would… cheer. It only dawned on me then that they really, truly were screaming out for me as well. Not everyone knew me. Those who had rushed from around Skyrim to see our victorious arrival may or may not have heard rumors of the Spirit of the Rift. But those from this region knew of me, and whispered to each other, pointed my way, and clapped for me.

“The Spirit is with him?” someone said.

“They say the Dragonborn took her with him to fight Alduin!”

It was a bit of a shock that anyone even cared or recognized me at all, but all around me the comments swept through the crowd. Those who knew me as the healer from Whiterun’s famous dragon attack over a year ago cried out congratulations that I once again led a warrior to victory without so much as a scar. People from the Rift gained confidence in their shouts for the Spirit, until my name was no longer a whisper on the edges of the congregation but a chorus of roars all their own.

We were making our way down the main avenue of the village when I spotted them, a small cluster of black and brown leathers sitting up on a fence, looking over the heads of spectators with varying degrees of celebration on their faces. And, of course it was right after seeing them that I noted the gleaming Skyforge steel armor not much further down the reception line, and the blue linen robes of mages from the college beyond that. Whether they were there for me, or to witness the occasion, I couldn’t be sure. I could bet fairly easily that at least the thieves were here for me, though.

“Brother?” I rasped.

“Shh,” he whispered back, knowing exactly what I was about to say, “Don’t think about any of them. This is about us right now. Enjoy it.”

I nodded dumbly. Never would I have anticipated this sort of welcome. The world felt surreal, as though I were looking in from other eyes, watching someone else’s memory. “They’re… screaming for us.”

“Yes.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Bask in it.” He punctuated the sentence by turning his face upward, his eyes scanning the empty blue expanse for clouds to count.

At long last, we waded through the huge crowd to finally get into the inn. The innkeeper, and a few dozen others, scrambled in behind us.

“It’s a long way down the Throat of the World,” Brother explained when he led me to the bar where the proprietor was hurrying into place to greet us. “We need to relax a bit, indulge the masses who want to adore us for a bit, stay a night and we’ll be on our way in the morning.”

He didn’t need to ask for anything from the innkeeper. There was a mug of ale smacked down hard on the counter fast as the keg could pour it. And, set in front of me… an empty bottle. I smiled and tucked it into my bandolier while the innkeeper fixed a mug for me. I didn’t drink it, I just held in between my palms until Brother finished his first and passed it his way. For hours we let people come up to us. They asked questions that I couldn’t answer. Many of them, Brother refused to give a clear response, perhaps because he didn’t know or maybe because he didn’t deem the truth right to tell. Several townsfolk and those from other villages around the Rift paid homage to me, some with empty bottles, others with bits of animal hide. Whether they realized I was human or not, those were the established offerings, apparently.

It must have been late. The late-winter sun had set, and the inn was absolutely packed with people. There was just barely room to dance, which Cicero and I did whenever the tempo was cheerful enough to excite him. At times we had to jump up onto the lip of the central hearth to dance, dangerously close to the flames. His laugh filled my ears; as long as we spun around, everything was perfect. I had Big Brother, I had Cicero, and we had the world. What could go wr--?

A hand on my wrist broke me free of the music’s trance. Standing down on the floor below, a willowy Dunmer with gentle lavender eyes looked up at me. “Not to take this moment away from you, Spirit, but my friends and I would like to offer you congratulations and thanks for saving Skyrim from Alduin. May we speak with you in private?”

Letting go of Cicero was hard. The only part that made this easier was feeling the jester follow behind me, and knowing that he would be waiting just out of sight in case I needed anything.

“Karliah,” I began when she led me through the crowded longhouse and out into the chilly night air.

When I caught sight of them before, I hadn’t realized how many there were. Karliah, Kynvind, Thrynn, Rune, Vex, and more. Brynjolf must have stayed behind to manage the guild, and many more were absent, but that so many had left Riften just to be here struck me profoundly. My eyes watered.

I opened my mouth to speak, but they came at me too fast. Arms wound around me, cheers that I was the best, comments of amazement and gratitude that I’d survived and bewilderment that I’d even gotten myself mixed up in all this to begin with, they all hit me at once from a dozen voices. At least three sets of arms embraced me while Thrynn, clearly having forgotten or regretting how we’d parted ways last, smacked his lips hard on mine. There were too many of them to greet, too many voices demanding attention. So I just smiled and laughed and cried and hugged whatever body was closest. Through wet eyes I even saw Sapphire smiling, shaking her head in disbelief.

“You came back in one piece!” Sapphire said.

“We’re just glad you’re alright!” Kynvind cried. “If I’d have known that you’d have been found in Whiterun, we wouldn’t have left you alone! Thank Nocturnal you’re alright!”

Rune shook my shoulder excitedly. “We’re camped out just outside of town to the south. We’ll give you the proper hero’s welcome back home!”

Ah, that familiar cracking feeling in my chest. I nodded, but I couldn’t bring myself to respond aloud. I had a home, didn’t I? A home that wasn’t Brother, complete with responsibilities and a future and people who depended on me. I gave myself to the Guild, perhaps not going so far as to pledge my soul to their Daedric matron, but a pact was made none the less. They were my family now, and for very good reason; could I ever trust Brother again the way I knew I could trust them?

But I nodded, and when I looked at each thief in turn to offer my strained smile, I saw my highwayman’s brows lower. I kissed Thrynn, and he took the opportunity to run his hands along the sides of my face, to deepen the kiss and to hold me against himself.

“I’ll see you soon,” he whispered into my mouth.

When he let me go, I wanted to cry and grab him and never let go again. Instead I whirled myself around and hurried so quickly into Cicero that it was all he could do to catch me around my ribcage and help me back into the inn, half-carrying me as if I were drunk. And I wanted to be.

“Little Listener?” my jester cooed.

We’d only just gotten back into the inn, and I leaned against his side, reveling in his warmth against the cold wind whistling between the door and its jamb right behind us. “I always wanted one, but I never planned to have a home. I never really thought... “

“You have everything you’ll ever need,” Cicero assured me. His voice was as even and sure and mellow as I could ever remember hearing it. There was only the slightest edge to it, the deranged promise at the bottom of his words that he would kill anyone to make sure his promise was always so.

“I have too much,” I complained. “All this time, I wanted and wanted and wanted. What am I going to do now that I have it, and can’t bear to give any of it up?”

Cicero shrugged, but his amber eyes remained bright. Leave it to the crazed little killer to always be the supportive, positive one! He’d been my light in the darkness last summer, when I decided not to go back to Cyrodiil, and now he was that again, collected and unjudging and really, truly only wanting what was best for me. How were some of my favorite people murderers with the Dark Brotherhood? It didn’t make any sense. “No one is telling you to give anything up, Little Listener. And loyal, loving Cicero would not ask you to. Go with them, or do not, but whoever you leave behind will not resent you, and we would not forget you. And when you return, you will be welcomed. But…” A self-deprecating smile spread on his gaunt face. “...Cicero would certainly like if you came with us, instead. Oh, you would like Dawnstar now! So warm and homey, comfy-cozy, and not a werewolf in sight!”

“Just the Night Mother?” I asked. Relief was already washing over me.

“Waiting always for you with open arms!” he crowed. He smiled his enigmatic little grin, his eyes flashing with all kinds of mischief and things left unsaid. He had far more to say on the matter, but he wouldn’t here, and if he did at all, it wouldn’t be straightforward. I might go the rest of my life without ever knowing just what he wanted to say. “One more dance?”

I nodded eagerly. That was what I needed, a reminder of the simpler times, some innocent fun and lively distractions.

But it was a different pair of hands that took me, one on my wrist and one on my waist. When he spun me around, I stepped with him without even seeing where his feet were going. He stepped, I stepped. He led me and I followed without question.

Like spinning under the Gildergreen, reveling in my first victory whilst the world spiraled gleefully around me; like laughing in the New Gnisis Cornerclub; like feeling warm and welcomed in the Ragged Flagon; like Winterhold with my fellow mages; like the quiet summer mornings in my shack and the rowdiest nights with Arvid and the guards in the barracks.

Home.

“We’ve both grown up.”

“It’s not a bad thing. It’ll just take getting used to.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize. We just have a lot to…”

“Get used to.”

“Yes.”

“But I’m proud of you. Look at you! You’ve grown so much.”

“Mother and Father would be proud of the both of us.”

“They would. Kvatch would be proud.”

“But we’re never going home.”

“No. We’re not.”

I didn’t realize until my cheeks ached that I was grinning like an idiot, but then, so was he.

“I have so many places to be, though,” I choked. “The guild, and Thrynn, and all this business with the Stormcloaks.”

“Forget about it.”

“The war?” I asked incredulously. “But what about the Thalmor?”

Brother laughed it away. “Oh, we’ll get around to it! But we’ve bought the world enough time, and the Stormcloaks and the Imperials have been at a stalemate for a while now. There’s no rush. But no, I don’t just mean the war. I mean all of it. Forget the guild. Forget the people who are making you second-guess everything. You deserve better.”

Heat rose in my chest. My next step was out of time. “What exactly…?”

His smile turned wicked. “Let’s just go on an adventure for a while! See more of Skyrim, explore some ruins! There’s a place called Blackreach, you’d love it! We’ll go to Solitude! We’ll go visit Olev in Markarth, damn the Thalmor! You can meet the rest of my Brotherhood! It’ll be great! We’ll spend, I don’t know, a few months, a year or two, however long we want! So just forget about everything else. Quit caring about other people and their quests. From now on, it’s you. It’s your adventure.”

I blanched, and my feet turned to lead right there on the dancefloor. “Are you suggesting that I just disregard all my friends and the people who love and care for me and all of my obligations and just _run away_ to go on some childish adventure?”

“Exactly that.” If his smile got any wider, it would take in his ears.

“And the irony of that isn’t lost on you one bit? After _everything_?”

“Not at all. I think it’s positively delicious.”

I didn’t have to search for anyone anymore. And I didn’t have to hide anymore. There was nothing to stop me. Just the wide, beautiful world beyond these walls, waiting for me. My golden horizon. My Skyrim. And the people who loved me, they could try to chase me all over Skyrim to try and drag me back home, but it wouldn’t feel right, not with the whole world so close. Skyrim is my home, Brother is my home, and I wouldn’t fool myself to think anything else anymore. Because after everything, didn’t I deserve my own adventure, just for a little while?

We only paused to leave my journal where it would be found on the road south of Ivarstead.

This time, I led him and he followed without question. 

 

_Twenty-Sixth of Sun’s Dawn_  
_If not now, then when? Goodbye. I love you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE END.
> 
> Please, please tell me what you thought of the story! Thoughts, comments, critiques are all very, very welcome!
> 
> Of course, it's taken me no time at all to get started on the next installment because I am a dingus like that. It starts [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4087363/chapters/9206191%22)!


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